Michael Macher in Phenomenal World:
On September 30, hundreds of federal law enforcement officers raided a 130-unit apartment complex in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. After rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter, rifle-wielding agents hurled stun grenades, kicked down doors and dragged residents out of their apartments, zip-tying and detaining some of them for hours. The operation, ostensibly targeting an alleged stronghold of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, resulted in thirty-seven arrests of mostly Venezuelan immigrants. Dramatic footage was posted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on social media alongside the ominous caption: “To every criminal illegal alien: Darkness is no longer your alley. We will find you.” DHS later conceded that only two of those arrested actually belonged to any gang.
The South Shore raid is a microcosm of the new regime imposed by immigration hardliners at the DHS, the Justice Department, and the White House. Communities targeted by this enforcement blitz are familiar with its hallmarks, from indiscriminate force to the abandonment of due process, vacuous claims of criminality to theatrical violence. The fallout of such tactics is well-documented: a veteran attacked and dragged into a Portland ICE field office; Congressional Candidate Kat Abughazaleh thrown to the ground outside an immigration processing facility in Chicago; a Mexican national fatally shot while driving away from ICE agents; a 79-year-old man body-slammed by Border Patrol agents; NYC Comptroller Brad Lander and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrested by ICE agents under false pretenses. And now, the brutal killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, followed by the Trump administration’s attempts to smear her as a “domestic terrorist.”
ICE’s crackdowns and shock-and-awe operations are being carried out alongside more routine sweeps, in which facial recognition algorithms and the whims of street-level agents—rather than legal status, identification documents, or judicial process—increasingly decide who is detained and deported. With public opposition to the agency reaching fever pitch in many cities, it is worth pausing to ask whether this terrifying spectacle represents something genuinely new.
More here.
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Where are we exactly, in this deathless debate about the crisis of masculinity? We stand splattered in discourse, ears ringing from the unceasing alarm over men and their prospects — their lack of education and lack of friends, their porn and gambling, their suicide rates. This while tech elites, sporting their bulgy new bodies, call for an infusion of “masculine energy,” and a hideous new sport is born: “sperm racing.” Is it any wonder that a stance has emerged of principled contempt? The so-called crisis, according to its critics, is actually a crisis of accountability, a refusal on the part of men to regulate themselves emotionally and behave like adults. In this view, men aren’t in crisis, America is in crisis, and to suggest otherwise is to engage in a kind of “
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The emotional experience of direct and renewed acquaintance with the realities of selective pressure, such as the sudden introduction of sexual jealousy into a seemingly safe relationship, has had for me an almost mystical character, as though what’s reawakened is the prehistory of my whole species, which unwinds from its reptilian recesses, ornamented with the bizarre, gemlike contingencies of thousands of howling animal triumphs and the wailing ghosts of unmutated failures, splitting my consciousness as though from underneath, a whole ocean bursting forth from the sudden shift of tectonic plates; but this alarming thing that emerges, this dark uncoiling dragon capable of incomprehensible violence, seems also dimly recognizable as simply, in some sense, my own self.
Let’s talk about a very 21st century scene. There’s an incident somewhere in the United States. The incident slots itself in neatly along the lines of preexisting ideological divisions. As the incident is unfolding, witnesses pull out their cell phone cameras to record it and those images are soon plastered across the web. Everybody sees essentially the same scene and everybody draws drastically different conclusions, depending on what their prior political convictions happen to be. And the result is a society split almost perfectly in two—disagreeing not only about underlying principles but even about which camera angles of an event, and which speed of playback, and which audio track, it prefers to focus on.
When my daughter 
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In 1894, a German archaeologist named Herr G Heim made a groundbreaking discovery. On the island of Cyprus, he excavated a tomb that belonged to a hitherto unknown ancient female poet by the name of Bilitis. Carved on the walls surrounding her sarcophagus were more than 150 ancient Greek poems in which Bilitis recounted her life, from her childhood in Pamphylia in present-day Turkey to her adventures on the islands of Lesbos and Cyprus, where she would eventually come to rest. Heim diligently copied down this treasure trove of poems, which had not seen the light of day for more than two millennia. They would have remained little known – accessible only to a small, scholarly audience who could decipher ancient Greek – had a Frenchman named Pierre Louÿs not taken it upon himself to hunt down Heim’s Greek edition, hot off the press, and translated Bilitis’s poetry into French for a broader reading public that same year (published as Les Chansons de Bilitis or The Songs of Bilitis). Bilitis might have been an obscure historical figure – no other ancient author mentions encountering her or her poetry – but the cultural and literary significance of Heim’s discovery was not lost on Louÿs. For, in several of her poems, Bilitis revealed that she crossed paths with classical antiquity’s most renowned and controversial female poet: Sappho.
Varouxakis’s book is primarily about Westerners’ own conception of the West — an approach that allows him to prove that even within the so-called West, the notion was not a coherent container. It is as much a history of terms and discourses as it is about ideas, and it starts the historical clock on those terms pointedly late. Most historians trace the concept of the West back to Herodotus in the fifth century BC, when the “western” Greeks fought the “eastern” Persians. In fact, Varouxakis writes, “‘The West’ as a potential political entity based on civilisational commonality is a modern idea that arose in the first half of the nineteenth century.”
Many of us experience a