The disparagement of the achievements of indigenous peoples

Some time ago, I discussed a book Sea People that described the incredible navigational feats of the Polynesian people who were able to reach and populate all the tiny but habitable islands in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Westerners did not think that these ‘primitive’ people could do this and felt that the islands must have been populated by people traveling west from the Americas. Thor Heyerdahl was one of the key proponents of this idea and his balsa raft Kon Tiki experiment was aggressively promoted by him as showing that this was the case. That thesis is no longer considered tenable but that wrong idea still persists in the public mind.

This is not the only example of how western archaeologists and anthropologists, faced with what seemed like impressive achievements in countries that they deemed backward, discounted the possibility that indigenous people might have done them and instead created theories that gave the credit to others. In a review of a new book about the giant sculptures of faces known as moai found on the island of Rapa Nui (formerly called Easter Island), Margaret Talbot reviews some of the other examples of this tendency, the most extreme version being that of Erich von Daniken.
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Publicly exposing the ICE thugs

One feature of human nature is that if you give anyone unquestioned power over another human being, they will be strongly tempted to abuse it and become sadistic tormentors. This is true of parents, teachers, priests, nuns, boy scout leaders, military officers, you name it. The chances get even worse if the abusers have anonymity since the shame of exposure is removed, giving them an even greater sense freedom to exercise their vicious fantasies.

This is what we have been seeing with the ICE thugs. These people, many reportedly poorly-trained, poorly vetted, and ignorant, the kind of people who could not get proper jobs in regular life, have suddenly found themselves given powerful weaponry, allowed to wear masks and other disguises, cover themselves with body armor to prevent any harm to themselves, remove any identifying markers, and promised the full backing of the government so that they are free of fear of any repercussions for whatever they do. Is it any surprise that they have turned into roaming bands of goons who feel that they can harass and threaten ordinary people and even injure and kill them for little or no reason?

Since most people cannot fight back with equal levels of force, the public has resorted to the kind of resistance that is available to them, which is develop techniques using social media and even old-fashioned ones like whistles, to quickly gather en masse whenever and wherever ICE appears to document the abuses and to identify them. They also tag and follow their vehicles and create protests wherever they happen to be staying or eating, even preventing them from using gas-station restrooms. This has had the effect of turning much of public opinion against ICE
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Blog comments policy

I will periodically repost my comments policy for those who recently started visiting this site.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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Nationwide anger forces Trump to back down

The strong nationwide reaction to the assault on communities and the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by the ICE goons has clearly put the Trump gang on the negative. After starting with their usual lies that the two victims were domestic terrorists who were attacking the ICE thugs, they started to backtrack when the videos of the events taken by eyewitnesses from multiple angles showed that that they were innocent people gunned down by thugs who seemed to feel that they could act with impunity. I do not watch TV but read that these videos were shown repeatedly, making the Trump lies untenable.

As a result of the uproar, Trump and his lackeys have started to refer to the events as a tragedy, put the murderers on suspension, demoted the Nazi cosplaying head thug Greg Bovino and removed him from the scene in Minnesota, and promised an investigation into the killings, though I am not holding my breath that anything will come from that.

Trump of course will never take responsibility or apologize but his lackeys are now backing away from their earlier bombast and distancing themselves from Stephen Miller, the ghoulish advisor to Trump and chief proponent of the harsh ICE behavior.
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How much drinking of alcohol is safe?

Alcohol is the most widely used legal drug. Its use has been sanctioned by long-standing use and efforts to ban it have been largely unsuccessful, as the Prohibition movement found out during the years 1920-1933 when the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages was completely banned in the US, after the 18th Amendment to the US constitution was easily passed in 1919. While private ownership and consumption of alcohol were not made illegal federally, some local jurisdiction did make those illegal too.

The legacy of prohibition is mixed.

The overall effects of Prohibition on society are disputed and hard to pin down. Some research indicates that alcohol consumption declined substantially due to Prohibition, while other research indicates that Prohibition did not reduce alcohol consumption in the long term. Americans who wanted to continue drinking alcohol found loopholes in Prohibition laws or used illegal methods to obtain alcohol, resulting in the emergence of black markets and crime syndicates dedicated to distributing alcohol. By contrast, rates of liver cirrhosis, alcoholic psychosis, and infant mortality declined during Prohibition. Because of the lack of uniform national statistics gathered about crime prior to 1930, it is difficult to draw conclusions about Prohibition’s effect on crime at the national level. Support for Prohibition diminished steadily throughout its duration, including among former supporters of Prohibition.

The 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment passed in 1933, ending that experiment.

That drinking alcohol causes or exacerbates problems is clear, with men being the key drivers.
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The problem of finding ways to combat bad speech

At a time when we are flooded with vile rhetoric from all over, especially on social media, it becomes difficult to know how to respond. The easy availability of AI engines to create realistic but fake text, audio, and video content has enabled the scope of such hate speech to explode. There have been calls for the social media platforms to more closely monitor the content of their sites and prevent such abuses but since the sites want people to spend time there, they are reluctant to take more than the mildest of steps.

The platforms Meta and X/Twitter are the worst offenders but even relatively staid ones like Substack have been roiled by controversy.

In January 2022, the Center for Countering Digital Hate accused Substack of allowing content that could be dangerous to public health. The Center estimated that the company earned $2.5 million per year from the top five anti-vaccine authors alone. The three founders responded via blog post affirming their commitment to minimal censorship.

Substack faced further criticism in November 2023 for allowing its platform to be used by white nationalists, Nazis, and antisemites. In an open letter, more than 100 Substack creators threatened to leave the platform and implored Substack’s leadership to stop providing a platform for political views with which they disagree. In response, Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie said the company would continue to allow the publication of extremist views because attempting to censor them would make the problem worse. Creators like Casey Newton, Molly White, and Ryan Broderick left the platform as a result.

The argument of free speech absolutists who oppose any attempts to censor content is frequently stated as “The best response to bad speech is more speech”. In other words, the way to combat speech that one abhors is to speak up against it and, in the free marketplace of ideas, the better speech should ultimately win.
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Bruce Springsteen’s powerful new song Streets of Minneapolis

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.Stay free

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— Bruce Springsteen (@brucespringsteen.net) January 28, 2026 at 9:02 AM

You can also listen to it here.

Music has played an integral part in protest movements, galvanizing and energizing people as we saw most memorably during the civil rights and Vietnam turbulence. I hope this becomes a protest anthem that is blasted through speakers whenever Trump and his thugs including ICE appear in public, and that it inspires other artists to do the same.

Here are the lyrics.

Through the winter’s ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
‘Neath an occupier’s boots

King Trump’s private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes

Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night

And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good

chorus

Oh Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst

Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Trump’s federal thugs beat up on
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow, dead

Their claim was self defense, sir
Just don’t believe your eyes
It’s our blood and bones and these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies

chorus

Oh Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Crying through the bloody mist
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Now they say they’re here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight

In our chants of “ICE out now”
Our city’s heart and soul persists
Through broken glass and bloody tears
On the streets of Minneapolis

chorus

Oh Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26

We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Trump is finding out that murdering white Americans is unpopular

The invaluable news source Drop Site has obtained video that clearly shows Alex Pretti being murdered by a CBP agent while being pinned to the ground by other agents.

On Saturday, U.S. federal agents killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, shooting him multiple times at point blank range while pinned down prone on the ground and surrounded by officers along Nicollet Avenue. The Saturday killing—committed by a Customs and Border Protection agent—is the third shooting by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP in as many weeks, and comes just one day after tens of thousands of Minneapolis residents took to the streets in subzero temperatures to protest the federal raids in Minnesota.

Close-up video footage, obtained by Drop Site, shows one agent push a person to the ground and then deploy a chemical irritant twice on the 37-year-old Pretti, who had gone to help the person pushed. Around eight agents then swarm and wrestle him to the ground. One of the officers then visibly unholstered his gun and fired around four point-blank gunshots at Pretti, a Minnesota resident who was reportedly on the scene as an observer. There are ten gunshots heard in all—at least five of them were fired at Pretti from a distance, while the person holding the camera shouts, “What the fuck did you just do?”
…

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both CBP and ICE, alleged the man “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun,” and released a photo of the purported firearm, which appears to be a Sig Sauer Emperor Scorpion. No video has surfaced showing Pretti approaching federal agents with a brandished gun.

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Why I blog

Today is the 21st anniversary of the beginning of my blogging. I originally started doing so on this day in 2005 on the platform that had been started by my university and then in 2012 was invited to join the FreethoughtBlogs collective and have been here ever since. When I started, blogging was new and it was considered to be slightly infra dig for academics to engage in it, a comedown from the forms in which they usually expressed their ideas, such as journal papers, magazine articles, and newspaper op-eds. In fact, a faculty colleague of mine in my university published his blog anonymously, out of embarrassment as to what his peers might think. But that feeling soon dissipated as the value of this form became apparent, enabling as it did the ability to very rapidly express one’s scholarly views on the news of the day. More and more faculty started blogging and some found their visibility increasing by leaps and bounds and being sought after by the media.

But as some have pointed out, blogging seems to be falling out of favor. This is partly because the audience has shifted to social media platforms that enable hot takes on the news to be disseminated even more quickly. However, those forms tend to require very short snippets mostly in the form of videos and hence are not really suitable for any thoughtful exposition on a topic, and thus not that appealing to academics.
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