Recent content by Lexicus

I'm unconvinced by your arguments, though I am vaguely interested in how far you're willing to take the spurious analogy between a state and a private house...

Right so when y'all are like "the Berlin Wall was totally evil, but fortifying Europe to make immigrants drown in the Mediterranean is fine," it....raises questions

What do you think about the Berlin Wall? Legitimate expression of a community's right to police its borders or gross violation of human rights by a police state?

Hence why I said "in many areas of the empire" This isn't entirely correct, where the Romans saw a peer competitor (pretty much just Parthia/Sassanids) they certainly did recognize the concept of an external border. This appears to be a series of strawmen; that there are no borders among...

The real problem with all of this is that blocking immigration simply won't really work without addressing its root causes which requires, ultimately, eliminating the distinction between the developing and the developed world. It may be a bit more feasible in Europe, but the US border is just...

...you interpreted that as praise? The misinterpretations and strawmen just get worse from there. Short answer is, I don't, but I wouldn't want to get in the way of you having an awesome conversation with yourself, so pop off. In Gaza-related news, meanwhile, there is now a bipartisan...

My "consent for its suppression"?? Whether I support the police breaking up the encampment surely would seem to be a separate question from whether I believe that effort was coordinated by the White House?

Destroy their tools? you identified the immigrants as tools of the oligarchs in an earlier post; what does "destroying" them mean? It seems to me there is not much difference between saying "we need to drown immigrants in the Mediterranean, because they're the tools of the oligarchs" and "we...

I highly doubt that this is meaningfully true (indeed a google search brings up an article by known crank Naomi Wolf,so that bolsters my skepticism). Why would Obama get involved? Occupy wasn't nearly enough of a threat to the system for that. Dude these are people camped out in the middle of...

Inno's analysis really only applies to modern Europe and it could be applied probably more or less equally to the Greek poleis of classical antiquity (which are the model of a "self-ruling community" in Western thought), but of course his argument ignores the fact that borders have very...

What is "the level that suits us"? Within any country there is a diversity of opinion on that question. In a US context the phrase you used could well refer to legalizing immigration, "controlling" it by allowing people through the proper crossing points, and giving them legal status, rather...

Depends. Generally gonna be right-wing in practice though.

The left-wing position on immigration is that if you heal the world of its many hurts then people won't need to move around in large numbers.

Living where I did in New Jersey, I had far more commonality of interest in this sense with people in New York City, in a different state, than I did with anyone south of Princeton. I mean this is basically untrue, the main "populist" voting bloc in Rome wasn't the middle class plebs, it was...

Claimed to, but generally cynically so. As you are aware. I'm not actually talking about any of those things, but you yourself made a normative claim that the distribution of power according to the constitution of the state should endeavor to "correct for" concentrated economic and social...