Political philosophers are criticised for their idealism, but when it comes to immigration they try to be ‘realistic’. Their aspiration to ‘realism’ often leads to nationalism (which I have analysed elsewhere as an implicit but heavy bias), but I still don’t understand why they aspire to realism on this issue. Philosophers have neither voters to attract, like the politicians, nor believers to bring to church, like the Popes.

Why are Popes far more progressive than philosophers on the issue of migration?
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This is the second in a very occasional series of posts discussing the following proposition: in the English-speaking world, the last 50 years has seen a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of text and visual mass media intended for children. The first post, on kids’ animated cartoons, is here.

As noted in that post, “intended for children” here means mass media particularly targeting children aged 4-12 as the primary audience. So, Disney movies are included here, while the original Star Wars movies are not. Kids absolutely watched Star Wars — I watched it as a kid — but they weren’t the primary audience.  Stuff aimed at the youngest children is excluded here, as is Young Adult stuff. (I agree that the boundaries of the latter category are very slippery.)  Movies means movies in theaters, not including TV movies or straight-to-video stuff.

So then: from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, movies for children were generally mediocre to bad. There were individual works that were good or excellent, but not many; and the average was dismally low. And the quality was not much better at the end of this period than at the beginning.

But starting in the back half of the 1980s, kids movies suddenly started getting better, and then around 1995 they started getting very good indeed. The period 1970-1986 was a dark age for kid’s movies; the period 1995-2012 (0r so) was an astonishing age of gold. There was a massive cultural transformation here, and it happened fairly quickly.

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Up at the French-Spanish border in Catalonia

Update The Trump regime has been stopped, or at least stalled, on all three fronts discussed below. In particular, the Hegseth-Noem report on the Insurrection Act seems to have been quietly buried. That doesn’t mean US democracy is safe by any means, but at least it has some chance of survival. More on this at my Substack

Back in November, when I concluded that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompli lots of readers thought I was going over the top. In retrospect, and with one exception, I was hopelessly over-optimistic. I imagined a trajectory similar to Orban’s Hungary, with a gradual squeeze on political opposition and civil society, playing out over years and multiple terms in office,.

The reality has been massively worse, both in terms of speed and scope. Threats of conquest against friendly countries, masked thugs abducting people from the street, shakedowns of property from enemies of the state, concentration camps outside the reach of the legal system, all happening at a pace more comparable to Germany in 1933 than to the examples I had in mind.

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And then the light of an older heaven was in my eyes
and when my vision cleared, I saw Titans.

— Alan Moore

Today’s Occasional Paper comes to us from the James Webb Space Telescope.

So let’s start with some basics:  nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  So when a telescope looks out into space, it’s also looking back into time.  Look at the moon?  You’re seeing it as it was when the light left it’s surface about 1.5 seconds ago.  Look at the Sun?  You’re seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago.  The Sun could have exploded 5 minutes ago, and there’s no way you could possibly know about it until 3 minutes from now.

Okay, so keep going.  Look at the nearest star?  You’re seeing it as it was about four years ago.  Look at the center of our galaxy?  30,000 years.  The light from there left around the high point of the last Ice Age.  Look out of our galaxy, at our neighbor galaxy Andromeda?  About 3 million years.

Now it starts to get weird and interesting.  Because as we start to look at things that are billions-with-a-b light years away — very distant galaxies — things start to change.  That’s because we’re looking back into the distant past of the Universe.  And the Universe is only 13.5 billion years old, so… yeah.  In theory, if you had a strong enough telescope, you could see back to the Big Bang and the beginning of everything.

Of course it’s not that simple.  The Universe is expanding.  Distant galaxies are receding from us.  More distant galaxies are receding faster, often at significant fractions of the speed of light (from our perspective).  This means that the distance to them is greater than you might expect.  It also means that their light is “red shifted” by the Doppler effect.  Also, while the Big Bang was very bright, once it cooled down the Universe was just a hot dark cloud of gas, mostly hydrogen with a bit of helium mixed in.  In that earliest pre-dawn epoch, there was not much to see, and no light to see with… until the first stars switched on.

And now for a brief historical digression.

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Thanks to James Wimberley for prompting me to write this, and alerting me to the data on China’s emissions

Most of the news these days is bad, and that’s true of the climate. Even as climatic disasters worsen, the Trump regime is doing its best to dismantle US and global efforts to decarbonize our energy systems. But there is still some surprisingly good news.

First, China’s emissions from coal-fired electricity appear to have peaked. Thermal power generation fell 5.8 per cent in January and February this year, relative to 2024. The only times this has happened previously were during the Covid lockdowns and in the aftermath of the GFC. On this occasion, total power demand fell by 1.5 per cent due to a warm winter, but the big decline in coal was due to increased solar generation. 

And China’s solar industry keeps on growing on all fronts. China added another 277 GW of PV last year, more than all the capacity installed in the world up to 2015. Recorded exports were 236GW, another record. Since production was estimated at more than 600 GW, it seems likely there are some unrecorded installations.

All this is happening even though new coal-fired power stations are still being built, largely for political rather than economic reasons. It seems likely that these plants will see limited operation as solar power (augmented with storage) meets more and more demand.

Second, the great AI boom in electricity demand has turned out to be a mirage, at least so far. This isn’t always obvious from the breathless tone of coverage. For example, this story leads with the claim that “Electricity consumption by data centers will more than double by 2030”, but leaves the reader to calculate that this implies an increase of just 1.5% in global demand. 

Notably, Microsoft which was one of the leading promoters of claims about electricity demand is now scaling back its investments. And large numbers of data centres in China are apparently idle

Even Trump is helping in perverse ways. His policies are already reducing projections of US economic growth, which will accelerate the decline of coal-fired power in particular. His attempts to defy economic reality by keeping coal plants open are unlikely to have much effect in this context.

And coal is on the way out in many other countries. Finland just closed its last coal-fired powerand even laggards like Poland are making progress

The picture is less promising with the transition to electric vehicles, which has slowed in most places. But once we complete the transition to solar, wind and storage, electricity will be massively cheaper. And once again, China is a bright sport, with electrics taking 25 per cent of the market in 2024, and new vehicles becoming cheaper and cheaper. BYD is now offering an electric car in Australia for less than $A30 000 (a bit under $20 000 US).

As I argued a year ago, the irresistible force of ultra-cheap solar PV will overcome the seemingly immovable barriers in its way.

Note Links got lost in copying from my Substack. You can find them here

With collapsing stock markets, retirement portfolios, and consumer confidence, there is an all-too-human tendency to focus on the economic effects of tariffs by their critics: they are a tax on consumption, they will raise inflation, reduce efficiency, and reduce take-home income, etc. This is familiar.

But this mistakes the full significance of a tariff-centric public policy. First and foremost, tariffs are an exercise in political agency. In Trump’s administration they are an assertion of political control by the executive branch. And, in fact, political decisionism is (see here; here; and here) a core commitment of the so-called ‘unitary executive theory,’ which I prefer to call (with a nod (here) to Benjamin Constant) ‘Bonapartism.’ According to Bonapartism the will of the American people generates a presidential mandate to take charge. If you were to have a certain conspiratorial sensibility this is a control over ‘Globalists’ or the ‘Woke;’ a certain progressive-democratic sensibility this is the exercise of control over ‘the economy.’ For Bonapartists it’s control over the ‘deep state,’ which turn out to be code for ordinary ‘civil servants and scientists with at-will employment, sanctity of contracts be damned.’

From my own, more (skeptical) liberal perspective tariffs are an expression of mistrust against individuals’ judgments; they limit and even deny us our ability to shape our lives with our meaningful associates as we see fit. And tariffs do so, in part, by changing the pattern of costs on us, and, in part, by altering the political landscape in favor of the well-connected few. Of course, in practice, tariffs are always hugely regressive by raising costs on consumer products. This is, in fact, a familiar effect of mercantilism and has been a rallying cry for liberals since Adam Smith and the Corn league. Tariffs are also regressive as tax instruments displacing the income tax.

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What is it that people desire when they desire riches? It may seem strange that once all basic needs are fulfilled, individuals would continue to strive for ever more, working ever harder, even at the cost of their own health. Why don’t they just enjoy life, with more time, and less stress, on their hands? Some do, but they tend to be regarded as weirdos by the mainstream of Western societies. Most people seem to understand the point of their work or their investment efforts not in fulfilling basic needs, but in something else. But what? As a philosopher working on economic issues, this is an important question, because it matters for understanding how humans behave in the economic sphere, and what this implies for institutional design. And it is also, simply, a philosophical puzzle: where does this seemingly irrational behavior come from? I got to think again about these issues when reading Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky. Words of a Yanomami Shaman.* This fascinating book developed out of the friendship between an anthropologist and a member of the Yanomami community, who live in the North of Brazil. Kopenawa got to know “white people’s” ways early in his life, working, among other things, as an interpreter, but he returned to his community and became a shaman as well as an activist for indigenous rights.

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One of the things that’s becoming clear is the determination of the Trump administration to divide humans living in the United States into two groups (to whom Wilhoit’s Law applies), citizens and immigrants. Actually it is a bit more complicated than that, because some of the legal citizens are, in reality, at best some sort of semi-citizen,¹ but let’s keep things simple for now. What I want to focus on is how incompatible this is with the notion of a free society, indeed with a free society even as those on the political right have historically seen it.

The Trumpists think they have a discretionary right to deport immigrants for wrongthink and wrongspeech, for taking part in a pro-Palestine demonstration, but also for writing a newspaper article, making a social media post, sharing a social media post, even liking one. They think that such people have no right not to be snatched off the street by goon squads. And they think that when immigrants face deportation for wrongthink they should have no right to contest the decisions made about them. The US courts may yet disagree with the Trumpists about these matters, but we’ll see.

Immigrants are people. Sorry for insisting on a truism, but I say it not just to argue that they have rights as humans, but also to make a point about their behaviour. US citizens are people too. And as people do, individuals in these two groups will barter and truck, fuck, form romantic ties, break bread, get drunk together, study together, worship together, share and dispute ideals, like and dislike books, operas, tv shows. Et cetera. You can’t monitor and control the activities of the individuals in one of these groups without monitoring and controlling the activities of the people in the other group who are in millions of cases the counterparties to their transactions and attachments.²

One of the marks of a free society, at least as many liberals and conservatives have insisted, is that it is composed of smaller societies through which much of its life is conducted.³ Associations, clubs, universities, schools, families, and so forth. Those societies have a life of their own and the wider society of which they form a part loses its own freedom and vitality when the state subordinates their inner life to its own purposes. Not that all such regulation is bad: some is necessary for justice and equality and even child protection (cf Brighouse and Swift)⁴. But overdo it and you create not a free society but a totalitarian one. Though immigrants may not be full legal and political members of the big society, they are often full and equal participants in the smaller ones and, as such, they need to be able to argue, express, consent, dissent, voice and exit just as the other members do. The smaller societies can’t function properly if they are composed of some people with rights and some people without them. Every member needs to hear what other members say and when some people can’t express themselves for fear of the consequences that not only destroys the inner life of society but also leaves individuals open to blackmail and exploitation.

As the United States slides into totalitarianism, there’s not much that anyone can say in a blog post that will prevent the worst. But if it is, at least, to stand as a warning to other societies that want to retain such freedom as they have, then we had better notice that the casual assumption that a neat quasi-natural divide can be drawn between citizens and immigrants isn’t limited to the US, it is the routine unthinking blather of politicians in Europe and elswhere, and not just on the extreme right. And if and when the bad times come and the immigrants get targeted, that will harm not just the direct objects of xenophobic policies but also all of the individuals who live lives entwined with theirs, some of whom will doubtless find their own status reclassified.