Cultural questions cannot be settled by war metaphors unless what you want is perpetual war
This essay by Carlo Iacono contains some beautiful, very quotable writing. It’s a good example of what can be produced when an author works with an LLM as an assistant, rather than just offloading the entire process to AI.
A society that thinks of itself as unfinished does not panic when new people arrive. It prepares. It builds welcome centres that feel like actual welcomes, it funds language classes that recognise adult dignity and childhood speed, it supports community organisations that know the local texture better than any central plan. Security and order are not the enemies of hospitality, they are its scaffolding. The point is not to pretend borders do not exist. The point is to design borders that are both humane and workable, so that fear does not have to run the place.
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The most radical thing an executive could do is learn the power of restraint. Strength is not always what you lift, sometimes it is what you put down. A president or a prime minister who distributes authority across competent institutions and insists on processes that can be seen, understood, and challenged is not surrendering leadership. They are proving that leadership serves something larger than the self. Independent justice is not naive. It is the ground on which trust can grow. When charging decisions are insulated from partisan whims, when immigration courts are funded so that due process is not an aspiration but a timetable, we are not being soft. We are being serious. We measure seriousness by how we treat those who have least power.
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We can reimagine how power is shared across place. Federalism, devolution, subsidiarity, these are all local dialects of the same idea, that different levels of government are good at different tasks and should learn from one another. Call it a laboratory spirit. A small country that pilots a high quality early years programme can teach a larger neighbour the method. A city that cracks the problem of bus reliability can hand over the playbook. The point is not a race to the bottom for weak rules and lower taxes, the point is a race to the top for the conditions that let people flourish. You do not have to agree about everything to trade recipes.
Cultural questions cannot be settled by war metaphors unless what you want is perpetual war. The fear that animates exclusionary politics is real, the sense that a way of life is sliding away while someone on television laughs.
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Government does not create society from scratch. It can make the weather better or worse. It can fund the community centre that becomes the hub where a retired electrician teaches teens to repair broken toasters and also broken confidence. It can support local journalism so that rumours are not the only news that travels. It can build parks that are safe and ordinary so that grandparents have somewhere to sit and toddlers have somewhere to learn balance. The choice is almost never between big and small government in the abstract. It is between government that enables human flourishing and government that clogs the works.
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I trust people more than any argument that begins with contempt for them. Not blindly. Not naively. Enough to design systems that enable the best in most of us rather than building the entire apparatus around the statistical worst. When given the chance, people volunteer, they reciprocate respect, they handle power with care more often than not. When someone behaves badly we need rules that respond firmly. When most people behave decently we need rules that do not treat them as suspects.
Source: Hybrid Horizons
Image: Matthew LeJune