Borders and the Fringe

• A speculation by Adam Lee about what will happen when we give up national borders;
• Items from the fringe about Trump’s three rules; Musk’s preference for high status males; Christian nonsense about evolution; simply lying about the Arlington story; and Musk’s infantile response to Robert Reich’s criticism.

Today’s thought piece.

OnlySky, Adam Lee, 3 Sep 2024: When we abolished borders, subtitled “After a while, it was hard to remember why we’d drawn the lines to begin with.”

Offhand, I’d say borders, especially between nations, were created and became established as those nations grew from town to cities and eventually nations derived from different ‘tribes’ started bumping into one another. And so clear boundaries were necessary to establish territory. Similarly, formal passports were only established in 1920.

Let’s see what Adam Lee says. It quickly becomes clear (though I’m only quoting excerpts) that this is a fictional scenario.

It begins:

In the twilight of the 21st century, humanity was staring into the abyss of declining birthrates.

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, our numbers as a species were declining every year. Capitalist economies premised on the assumption of infinite growth couldn’t cope. Stock markets stagnated, inflation surged out of control. Governments had belatedly tried to address the problem, but every means of encouraging people to have kids—longer parental leave, tax breaks, cash payments, religious scolding—had failed.

Sounds familiar.

At the same time, people in the tropics were suffering. We’d completed the green transition and phased out fossil fuels, but too late to stave off the damage. The immense burden of climate change fell heaviest on poor countries, those least equipped to deal with it. There were deadly heat waves, droughts and dust storms. Irrigation canals ran dry, rivers were reduced to trickles over beds of cracked mud, and crops withered in the fields. Mega-typhoons smashed the coast and swamped cities.

And then.

The arguments dragged on for years—anguished editorials, screaming tabloid headlines, picketers and protests fired by xenophobic rage. Politicians ran for office promising the impossible—every border a fortress defended by barbed wire and machine guns, walling out the world at any cost—and a few of them won. Some ethnostates resisted to the bitter end.

But the logic of necessity couldn’t be denied forever. Finally, grudgingly, we reached an agreement on what had to be done.

The border guards stepped down from their posts. Guard towers were left unmanned. The shabby, never-finished walls were pulled down to cheers.

It would later be called Boundless Day.

Passports became a thing of the past. From that day on, the Earth was held in common trust. Everyone could live and work where they chose. The old national borders still appeared on maps, but only as archaic curiosities.

And so on. And it ends:

Like many social changes, once people got used to the borderless world, it proved to be such a sensible idea that we wondered what the fuss had ever been about. We realized it had never made sense to carve up humanity with arbitrary legal lines, to chain people to one patch of ground or foreordain their future based on accidents of birth.

Politicians had to try harder to serve the needs of the population, knowing that people could pack up and move en masse if they didn’t like how they were being governed. As cultures mixed and mingled, new hybrids were born: new fusion cuisines, new polyglot tongues, new syncretist festivals. There were exuberant outbursts of art and creativity. People who had been separated by canyons of mutual incomprehension came to understand each other a little better. The world got a little wiser and a little kinder, one turning at a time.

This is speculation, of course, but it’s largely happening already. Sure, you need a little passport booklet to travel to most other countries — but people still travel, more and more.

The world is becoming more and more cosmopolitan, less and less distinct or tribal.

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Items from the Lunatic Fringe.

Entertainment Weekly, Maureen Lee Lenker, 1 Sep 2024: The Apprentice is a riveting if familiar account of Donald Trump’s years spent at Roy Cohn’s knee

A review of a new biopic of Donald Trump, and his relationship with Roy Cohn (counsel for Joseph McCarthy in 1954, and a major character in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (discussed here)), opening Oct. 11th. Noted here for this precis of Trump’s philosophy:

Cohn takes Trump under his corrupted wing, teaching him the three rules by which he lives: 1) Attack, attack, attack; 2) Admit nothing, deny everything; and 3) No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat. It’s a sickeningly familiar playbook to anyone who’s watched the news in the past decade.

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Mediaite, Sarah Rumpf, 2 Sep 2024: Elon Musk Promotes Tweet Calling for Democracy to Be Replaced With ‘Republic’ Run By ‘High Status Males’

Musk quoted a bizarre post, apparently from 4chan and reposted by Autism Capital, that

People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. They literally do not ask “is this true”, they ask “will others be OK with me thinking this is true”. … Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective “is this true?” filter. This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.

This is complete and utter nonsense, of course, but it’s weird to see here some kind of defense of autistic people.

Once again, these people do not believe in democracy. They are fascists — only superior people, to their way of thinking, which of course includes themselves, are worthy of leading.

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More about how conservatives believe things that are not true.

Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 1 Sep 2024: Federal judge dismisses Christians’ lawsuit to stop teaching evolution in Indiana schools, subtitled “An Indiana couple claimed science education interfered with their kids’ ‘religious beliefs as a Christian'”

So they are claiming that “religious beliefs as a Christian” means denying the reality of the world? Of course this has been obvious for a long time, and it’s been obvious that they deny reality in order to maintain their religious beliefs.

The Reinoehls were very concerned that their last child would learn about “the state-sponsored, atheistic, religious Theory of Evolution” as well as “the state-sponsored, atheistic, religious Big Bang Theory.” (Which is to say that any reasonable person would have known this lawsuit was ridiculous by page 3.)

And they spout all sorts of simplistic misunderstandings about evolution.

They said evolution was false because no species “has ever been observed to change into another”—which isn’t how it works—and that most scientists presented with Ken Ham-style critiques of evolution “admit that the Theory of Evolution is highly flawed as a scientific theory.” (Really?! Who?! No citations are given.) Finally, they say that even though evolution has been “scientifically disproven,” which is news to me, it’s taught as scientific “truth” in schools.

What about the Big Bang Theory? The lawsuit spends pages rehashing Creationist ignorance about the topic before concluding it could never have happened. There are references to Newton’s First Law, the Hubble telescope, and thermodynamic. They go on to say geological dating and the fossil record are also hoaxes.

Do they have any conception of the consensus among the world’s thousands, even millions, of scientists, who have in fact concluded things they simply wish not to believe?

The mother has a history of ludicrous lawsuits.

So far, she’s been hindered by her own incompetence. But all it takes is one right-wing judge to use her lawsuits as a green-light to rule however he or she wants, and Reinoehl could create the chaos she seeks.

I’d like to believe cases like this are evidence only of an extreme minority of the population. But still, as Hemant says, all it takes is for one ideological, or gullible, judge to agree with such a charge, to make everything worse for the rest of us.

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MSNBC, Steve Benen, 3 Sep 2024: Team Trump didn’t like the Arlington story, so they rewrote it, subtitled “Since the scandal broke, Trump has characterized himself as a victim, labeled it a ‘hoax,’ concocted allegations about White House involvement and attacked the vice president.”

And this actually works for a lot of people.

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Noted for Musk’s infantile response.

Robert Reich, 3 Sep 2024: Six ways to rein in Musk, subtitled “(And Musk’s infantile response to my criticisms)”

How to reign Musk in:

1, Boycott Tesla;
2, Advertisers should boycott X;
3, Regulators around the world should stop Musk from disseminating lies and hate on X;
4, In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission should demand that Musk take down lies that are likely to endanger individuals — and if he does not, sue him under Section 5 of the FTC Act.
5, The U.S. government — and we taxpayers — have additional power over Musk, if we’re willing to use it. The U.S. should terminate its contracts with him, starting with Musk’s SpaceX.
6, Make sure Musk’s favorite candidate for president is not elected.

Reich concludes,

PS: After The Guardian published an earlier version of this post, Musk went on a tirade — agreeing with a tweet calling me “a traitor to the American people;” then calling me “Robert Reichtard;” then saying “To be totally honest, I don’t want Reich arrested, as I wouldn’t want to inflict having listen to him upon his jailers. A fate worse than death!;” then identifying me as “a miniature wanker” (see below); then giving a thumbs-up emoji to a post saying I’m “so dumb as to think socialism is a good thing.”

This is prime evidence for the thesis of Cory’s column that I noted yesterday: success in the world is no evidence of a superior mind. Success is mostly about chance. Luck. And/or having the right parents.