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Self In Society Roundup 67
Venezuela, Greenland, Bari Weiss, Minnesota, immigration, Christianity, and more.
by Ari Armstrong, Copyright © 2026
Maduro: Two things are true: Maduro is a horrible person and a mass-murderer, and the U.S. had no legitimate business invading Venezuela or capturing Maduro. Congress has the authority to declare war, but, as we have known for a long time, Trump and his MAGA movement are anti-Constitutionalists. So much for Trump's already-warn isolationist schtick! I don't believe for a second that Trump ordering Maduro's capture has anything to do with the drug trade (the main pretext for the assault); remember Trump's pardon of a major drug trafficker? I think this is mainly about three things: a distraction from the Epstein files (see Trump's old posts predicting Obama would use the military as political distraction), yet another assertion of the raw power of the Imperial Presidency, and Trump's mercantilist mentality. That said, Venezuela did nationalize the property of U.S. oil companies in 1976 and 2007 and ran its oil industry into the ground. I hope that the military action, although an unjust and dangerous assertion of U.S. power, leads to improvements in the lives of Venezuelans, who have suffered terribly under Chávez and Maduro. This seems far less likely given that Trump favors Maduro acolyte Delcy Rodríguez over democratically elected reformer María Corina Machado. David Frum: "Trump uses the military so often because he correctly assesses that respect for the courage and professionalism of its personnel will transfer to him." Read also Ilya Somin and Laura Jedeed.
Greenland: The Trump administration keeps threatening to take Greenland, currently a territory of Denmark. This is completely insane. Here's why this worries me. By making such threats, Trump and his minions not-so-subtly signal to Putin and Xi that it's not really such a big deal to invade Ukraine (or the Baltics, or Poland) or Taiwan. After all, if the territory is nearby, if it serves some sort of military advantage to hold, why the hell not? We have to look at Trump's invasion of Venezuela and his threats against Greenland in the context of the expansionist aims of Russia and China. I think we're closer to WWIII, and then nuclear warfare, than most people imagine.
Balko on the Boat Murders: Radley Balko: "104 murders in 107 days: These are murders, and basic humanity demands that we not get complacent about them."
Weiss Caves: Bari Weiss pulling the 60 Minutes story on the U.S. sending Venezuelans to a horrific torture prison in El Salvador looks bad. Watch the segment leaked via Canada. The United States government sent people there without due process of law, knowing full well they would be brutalized. No one who defends such actions can justly claim to be a defender of the Constitution. Weiss and her defenders said pulling the story was justified because the news team did not try hard enough to get relevant government agents on tape. But the team did try, and no government agent was willing to be interviewed for the story. Also this seems like ridiculous both-sides-ism. Imagine a story about the horrors of slavery pulled because it did not adequately present the viewpoint of the slavers. The story is complicated by the fact that CBS is owned by Paramount Skydance, which was trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, a merger subject to government interference. Politicizing business decisions is horrible policy and inherently corruptive. Yaron Brook mentioned the story in his December 22 podcast (1:25:00 marker).
Corruption in Minnesota: Despite Nick Shirley's lack of journalistic rigor, I found his video on Minnesota fraud to be basically convincing in terms of revealing fraud in Minnesota child-care and health-care. See also the New York Times, ABC, and Reason. Tim Walz dropped out of his reelection campaign for governor.
RFK's Vax Irrationalism: Amesh Adalja speaks.
Targeting Immigrants: Stateline: "Immigration arrests under the Trump administration continued to increase through mid-October, reaching rates of more than 30,000 a month. But, rather than the convicted criminals the administration has said it’s focused on, an ever-larger share of those arrests were for solely immigration violations." In Colorado ICE is arresting mostly people without criminal convictions, including children and elderly people. DHS has revoked "Protected Status" for many Ethiopian immigrants. There's been some judicial pushback regarding migrants from some regions.
Paging DOGE: J. D. Tuccille: "Rand Paul's Annual Festivus Report Highlights $1.6 Trillion in Wasteful Spending." (It's almost as though Republicans other than Paul don't actually care about wasteful spending.)
Huemer on Religion: Michael Huemer argues that Christianity, although false, is not as bad as some other common doctrines. He writes: "Religion gives them [some people, especially Christian philosophy students] immunity to some of the completely false and destructive ideas going around our culture, such as moral relativism, skepticism, communism, (il)logical positivism, determinism, physicalism, and empiricism. Religious people are immune to those beliefs because they are basically ideological beliefs, and religious people already have their own ideology. Since they have no need for these other ideologies, they are free, on a wide variety of subjects, to just accept what common sense tells them." I concede some ideologies are further from the truth and more destructive than others. But we should aim to embrace ideas that are true, not just ideas that are marginally less-bad than others. I think Huemer substantially underestimates the harms of religious faith; see chapters 6, 7, and 8 of my book.
Techno-Humanist Manifesto: Read Jason Crawford's essays on the matter (or wait for the MIT book).
DeLong on Alexander: Brad DeLong: "As a society we no longer measure greatness by who is the best at killing."
Wei on the Alien and Sedition Acts: William Wei: "The underlying reason for the passage of these laws [by the Federalists] was to undermine their political opponent: the Democratic-Republican Party led by Thomas Jefferson. In other words, national security became a pretext for political repression. The Naturalization Act and the Alien Act restricted immigrants who were believed to favor Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. . . . The Federalists sought to protect themselves against a 'horde' of Irish Catholic immigrants arriving in their fledgling country who might vote for their political opponents, as well as potentially dangerous Frenchmen promoting revolution on their shores." The Sedition Act was used to censor political speech.
Trump's Nastiness: Trump called people from Somalia "garbage," a straight-up racist remark. Trump called Tim Walz "retarded," then doubled down, inspiring his supporters to mock the Walz family on social media and even to engage in drive-by harassment. To paraphrase Aaron Ross Powell, Trump is the weak man's fantasy of a strong man ("weak" here referring to character).
Failed Federalism: The New York Times article talks about how the Trump administration wants to replace no-strings housing subsidies with requirements for "sobriety or work." But why is this even a federal policy?
Early Hominins: Science: "Three kinds of hominins, including a species that was our direct ancestor, living in the same swampy valley [in what is today South Africa] roughly 2 million years ago," evidence suggests.