jus soli

Via Boing Boing, we learn that Trump intends to nullify the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution (previously here and here), by means of an executive order, that guarantees birthright citizenship to children born within the United States’ territory regardless of the status of their parents.
Though rarer and usually qualified in most of the rest of the world, thirty-one countries in the Americas automatically confer citizenship (though with America, also comes the onerous burden of taxes on worldwide income, which along with citizens Eretria one cannot opt out of) proponents of unrestricted jus soli (law of the soil, as opposed to jus sanguinis which puts an additional requirement for citizenship that one or both parents to have been born in the country) argue that without these protections, we risk creating a disenfranchised underclass and more stateless persons. During the interview, Trump claims he is already in consultation with counsel on drafting the executive order, and though it is unclear how he has the authority to undo a duly ratified amendment, one of his Svengalis might have shown him the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and explained that it is meant to exclude children born to enemy forces engaged in hostile occupation of the country’s territory and convinced him it’s referring to the caravans of murderous migrants massing at the borders.

∼ ≺

Via Duck Soup, we’re served a nice demystification of a free market fairy tale—that of preference and predatory capitalism. It’s well established that once a chain operation moves into a market, if local, established businesses cannot compete, they’ll eventually be edged out by dint of inefficiencies and although the community may mourn the loss of one of its anchors, customers will ultimately be better served by the franchise.
It’s a bit of cold comfort and consolation but what it relies on illusion preference (the symbols above are shorthand in that field of study for equivalence and strong preference) that predicates the narrative on flattening out all companies as entrepreneurs running lemonade stands—which is vastly far off from the case of a local shop competing with a multinational corporation. This scenario reminds me of monopsony—the big company will necessarily enjoy much larger margins for profit because it has great purchasing power for supplies, advertising and even recruiting labour. The big corporation does not even necessarily need to undercut the competition, charging the same or even more for a comparable good or service or attract and retain loyal patrons, but magnitude will eventually prevail—that is, until people and governments are disabused of the myth of the Invisible Hand that belies its appeal.

miscellany

Oxford Words guest blogger Elyse Graham gifts us with a name for the phenomenon that coincided and defined the transition from the early internet into the period called the Web 2.0 when the rise of social media platforms made going online interactive—for virtually all whereas it was the bailiwick of a few companies and caretakers previously—and not just something to be read or watched: folksonomy.
Information theorist Thomas Vander Wal coined the idea in 2004 for the informal systems of curation and classification (a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy) that were being developed through labels and hashtags. Whereas thanks to advances in search engine indexing, visiting websites and bookmarking websites could be an uncategorised activity (Everything is Miscellaneous was a 2007 book on the power of the digital disorder and the lack of an authoritative card catalogue), sharing seems to need a tag of some sort—even if it’s made conspicuous by its absence. Folksonomies have moved beyond being a utilitarian tool for grouping and information retrieval and have taken on a life of their own as stage whispers and theatrical asides, revelling more in their unhelpful, for the nonce specificity rather than defining broader genre and genus.

stochastic terrorism

Before virtue signalling, red-pills and dog-whistles, someone formulated the title term, borrowing from the discipline of mathematics and control theory that describes something randomly determined, to define the use of mass-communication as a means of rabble-rousing and provoking violence that fall within the statistical tolerances of what we’ve come to accept as unsurprising but each incident is in isolation itself unpredictable and unexpected.
We know the drill.  We know that the words of demagogues have the power to agitate, and we deputise and acknowledge that tragic outcomes—though avoidable—are inevitable.  We are then left to deal with the consequences of those emboldened and benighted whose cult-leaders by this act of tribute are kept beyond reproach and responsibility.