Category: Reflections
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You know the register before you can name it. It is a voice that expresses concern about something it will not identify. It arrives in a deck, in a framing question, in a closing slide about listening to voices. It is urgent and it is unfalsifiable, because nothing in it can be checked, because nothing…
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The problem Every society has work that must be done and cannot be sold. The barn after the fire. The drainage ditch before the spring. The canal dug by hand because there is no capital to dig it any other way. The widow’s roof. The market will not supply this labour, because the market prices…
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I. The Trap Is Not a Theory of Structures. It Is a Theory of Collective Nervous Systems. Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap is usually taught as a structural claim: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, war becomes likely. The structural reading is correct as far as it goes. But it is incomplete,…
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The rule that shows the structure Start with the cleanest legal case in the world, because it makes the abstract point immediately visible. Jewish status passes through the mother. A child born to a Jewish woman is Jewish; a child born to a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman is not. The rule is old,…
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The thesis A society at the peak of its liberalization is not a society without a hierarchy. It is a society that has learned to grant exemptions without disturbing the order. This is the difference between a norm upgrade and a norm reordering. An upgrade adds a group to the existing arrangement. A reordering changes…
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The thesis There is a pattern in the cultural history of male aesthetics, and it is not a pattern of taste. It is a pattern of legibility. Male beauty becomes culturally legible when the surrounding society has a shared script for what male agency is. The body is read as a sign of something —…
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The question is not moral Start by discarding the moral framing, because it makes the question unanswerable. The question is not whether a man should be allowed to date multiple women. Adults are allowed. The question is what a bounded community does to a man who dates within it, and how many concurrent partners a…
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The bro code is the weak version of this rule Everyone knows the bro code. You do not date your friend’s girlfriend, and you do not date his ex without a conversation that is at least half an apology. The rule is unwritten, universally understood, and enforced with a severity that surprises people who assume…
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The claim The claim is narrow and it should be stated precisely, because the loose version of it is indefensible and the precise version is not. An eighteen-year-old woman is the best available judge of whether an older partner is fit. Not the best judge of his finances, his politics, or his character in every…