the brandensite

Finding Populist Equilibrium 2025 May 7

The obvious problem with ruthlessly enforcing E-Verify is that most people, in their day-to-day reality, like consensual exchanges, including with illegal immigrants. What people don't like are videos of undocumented Guatemalans setting subway passengers on fire, or caravans flooding across the border. They want a sense that things are “under control.”

The distinction here can be thought of as daytime and nighttime preferences. At night when watching the news, many people are worried about illegal immigration—this is the realm of abstraction, where pixels of a woman burned alive by a Guatemalan migrant grace TV screens like shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave. Here, law and order prevail. But in the day-to-day, people go back to behaving like mostly rational economic agents, entering consensual exchanges with undocumented Guatemalans. The correct equilibrium if you are a skilled politician, of course, is to pander to the former while preserving the latter. Results may vary depending on the immigrant population in question, but suffice it to say, this isn’t so difficult in Texas.

Andy Warhol Drew a Penis on the Moon 2025 May 6
No, really. Yes, that Moon.

Star Trek Writers' Guide 2025 May 5
Cliff Pervocracy (again, now) summarizes the Star Trek Writers' Guide so you don't have to read it yourself, reproducing the juiciest bits for us on their blog. Take-away from the take-away for The Original Series: Keep it cheap. Take-away from the take-away from The Next Generations: Gene Roddenberry is very horny.

Clever and Lazy 2025 Apr 30

I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.

Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.

I've heard this before, but whose wisdom is this? Quote Investigator researches and has found many similar versions attributed to many different German generals. The earliest reference, however, is 1933 and in English, accredited to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, Commander-in-Chief of the Weimar Republic's armed forces. "If the 1933 citation was accurate then the expression appeared in German in a Berlin newspaper in 1932 or 1933. QI has not yet located this instance."

10 Observations About Tokyo 2025 Apr 30
I just got back from my first visit to Tokyo, staying in the city for only two brief days. This guy's observations from having lived there for six months (after 15 years in Montreal) match exactly what I just experienced myself, or at least the portion of the list I was exposed to in my short visit.

High Agency 2025 Apr 30
Salt grains required. This guy called George Mack created this website about an idea he's rapt with: the idea of people being "high agency" or "low agency." He claims the term is hard to define even if he knows it when he sees it, yet it doesn't seem that difficult to me: a 'high agency' person is someone who gets things done. He then goes on to expand and expound on this concept, touching on some motivating ideas along the way, such as how to avoid quagmires and other "low agency traps."

It's basically the modern version of a self-help book, and so long as you avoid the paradox of self-help (never thinking you're good enough because you're viewing the world only through the lens of self-improvement) then maybe it'll be useful to you. It helped me clean out my inbox, at least.

My grandfather always appreciated a pun and a gag, so he created these round paper discs with printed on them the word "Tuit". If someone was procrastinating, saying they'll get something done "when I get around to it," well then, he'd be able to hand them a round tuit.

Lumpenmilitariat 2025 Apr 30
Marx and Engles in the 1940s coined the term Lumpenproletariat when discussing the unthinking lower class of society who are easily exploited by counter-revolutionary forces. It includes criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes.

But then there is the term Lumpenmilitariat. Polish journalist and chronicler of Africa Ryszard Kapuściński in his essay collection The Shadow Of the Sun introduced the word to me, attributing it to Ugandan historian Ali Mazrui, and explaining it thusly (in 1998):

Here is one of Africa’s problems: its intelligentsia lives for the most part outside its borders, in the United States, in London, Paris, Rome. Remaining in their native countries are, at the bottom, masses of illiterate, downtrodden, utterly exploited peasants; at the top, the corrupt bureaucracy or arrogant, coarse soldiers (the lumpenmilitariat, as the Ugandan historian Ali Mazrui calls them).

Being me, I needed to know more. And so, linked here is where I believe Mazrui first introduced the term, in an academic political science paper written while a professor at Uganda's Makerere University and published in March 1973, about two years into Idi Amin's military dictatorship of the country. Amin's politics famously drifted while in power, and Makrui's paper is an examination into why, seemingly framed in an attempt to reckon what he was witnessing in Uganda with the theory of Marxism.

And so, the word in question, defined by Makrui's own self:

The lumpen proletariat is a mass of disorganized workers and ghetto dwellers in the developed world; but the lumpen militariat is that class of semi-organized, rugged, and semi-literate soldiery which has begun to claim a share of power and influence in what would otherwise have become a heavily privileged meritocracy of the educated.

Mazrui later left Makerere University and Uganda entirely after feeling that he lost political standing by declining an offer by Amin himself. Quoted in 1986 in the New York Times:

I was, in a sense, running away from Idi Amin. For a while, I was in good standing in Uganda. But I declined his invitation to be his Kissinger, a special adviser. I might have done some good. Or, possibly, I wouldn't have been alive to talk to you here today.

He spent much of the remaining portion of his career in the USA, a professor at several prominent universities here, and even produced a TV documentary.

Oscar Wilde bagged Walt Whitman 2025 Apr 29

Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in 1882.

You are either the kind of person to whom this matters a great deal, or the kind of person to whom it matters not at all. To the latter I say: yours is the narrow road and the straight, and I extend to you a hearty and fulsome handshake, as well as my sincerest wishes for your continued good health. To the former I say: Want to hear about the time Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (probably) hooked up??

ChatGPT now attempting to earn product referral fees 2025 Apr 29
Starting yesterday, apparently ChatGPT now will return at slightest provocation a list of products for you to purchase and for the creator to earn referral money for selling you. In the LLM's own 'words': "This update aims to offer a more personalized and streamlined shopping experience directly within the ChatGPT interface." The reddit who stumbled into this and posted it first wrote "The Enshittification has arrived" about which Josh Sawyer blueskied best: "oh no they got shit in the poop"

Chongqing, the world’s largest city – in pictures 2025 Apr 29
The Guardian published their reporter Alessandro Gandolfi's vacation snaps as he poked around the city of Chongqing. The article's bold text at the top claims "The largest city in the world is as big as Austria, but few people have ever heard of it," which seems rather contradictory to me. Or Euro-centric, perhaps. Anyway, they continue: "The megacity of 34 million people in central of China is the emblem of the fastest urban revolution on the planet. The Communist party decided 30 years ago to unify and populate vast rural areas, an experiment that has become a symbol of the Chinese ability to reshape the world." It's just a really big damn city not on the Western tourist's radar, is all. Whatever. Enjoy the photos. They're alright.