Rad Geek People's Daily

. . . Demonstrations occurring on Columbia’s campus since Oct. 7, 2023, have included both constitutionally protected speech and unlawful conduct, but the government has not made clear the factual or legal basis for Mr. Khalil’s arrest. The statements the government has released suggest its decision may be based on his constitutionally protected speech. This lack of clarity is chilling protected expression, as other permanent residents cannot know whether their lawful speech could be deemed to align to a terrorist organization and jeopardize their immigration status.

The federal government must not use immigration enforcement to punish and filter out ideas disfavored by the administration. It must also afford due process to anyone facing arrest and detention, and must be clear and transparent about the basis for its actions, to avoid chilling protected speech. To that end, we request answers to the following questions:

What was the specific legal and factual basis for Mr. Khalil’s arrest on March 8?

What is the specific legal and factual basis for Mr. Khalil’s detention?

What is the specific legal and factual basis on which you are seeking revocation of Mr. Khalil’s green card?

Will Mr. Khalil be afforded the due process protections required by U.S. law?

Is it your intention to seek the revocation of lawful immigration status on the basis of speech protected by the First Amendment?

— Carolyn Iodice (2025), FIRE Letter to Trump Administration Officials on Detention of Mahmoud Khalil
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, March 10, 2025

There are two kinds of problems in the world: strong-link problems and weak-link problems.

Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link problems by making the weakest links stronger, or by eliminating them entirely.

. . .

It’s easy to assume that all problems are like this, but they’re not. Some problems are strong-link problems: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters. Like music, for instance. You listen to the stuff you like the most and ignore the rest.

. . .

Figuring out whether a problem is strong-link or weak-link is important because the way you solve them is totally different:

When you have a STRONG-LINK problem:

• Increase outliers/variance/weirdness because you’ll benefit from having more very good things
• Don’t gatekeep because you might accidentally keep the best out
• Ignore the worst
• Improve the best
• Accept risk, because the downside doesn’t matter.

When you have a WEAK-LINK problem:

• Decrease outliers/variance/weirdness because you’ll be harmed by having more very bad things
• Gatekeep because it keeps the worst out
• Improve the worst
• Ignore the best
• Avoid risk, because the downside is all that matters

. . .

Science is a strong-link problem.

In the long run, the best stuff is basically all that matters, and the bad stuff doesn’t matter at all. The history of science is littered with the skulls of dead theories.

. . . Here’s the crazy thing: most people treat science like it’s a weak-link problem….

— Adam Mastroianni, Science Is A Strong-Link Problem
Experimental History, 11 April 2023

By A.E. Stallings, from POETRY (May 2020); recently featured on Poetry Foundation’s Audio Poem of the day podcast.

Daedal

To build a labyrinth it takes
A twisted mind, a puzzled art,
A fractal branching of mistakes.

Drag out the shovels and the rakes,
The spirit level, sacred chart.
To build a labyrinth it takes

Shadows, stones, a way that snakes
And ladders to its shaky start;
An average mazing of mistakes,

The kind that everybody makes,
Set random intervals apart.
To build a labyrinth it takes

Dead ends that seem like lucky breaks,
The paths of bats that weave and dart
Through limestone caverns of mistakes.

The shaken Etch A Sketch awakes
A lost child buried in its heart.
To build a labyrinth it takes
Some good intentions, some mistakes.

— A.E. Stallings (2020)
Daedal, in POETRY (May 2020)

Reading: Katherine Dee, No, Culture Is Not Stuck, at Wisdom of Crowds (4 October 2024).

The idea that culture is stagnating, as Ted Gioia puts it — or that it’s stuck, as Paul Skallas says — isn’t new. Neither is the observation that there’s something different about how bad things are in this particular moment. The cultural malaise is palpable and cross-generational. The complaints are more than just old man yells at cloud. Everyone feels it.^[1]

Consider film and television, an easy target for cultural pessimists, and for good reason. The signs of decay are hard to ignore. . . .

. . . If you complain about these trends, the responses you’ll get typically fall into two camps. One sympathizes with you, but offers only a resigned How are you just now noticing? The other dismisses your concerns as a symptom of aging. There’s plenty of great music, movies, literature, and fashion, and if you don’t like it, that’s your inability to keep up.^[2]

Both responses miss something important, though. They both assume that what we know as “culture” is the only type of culture that could ever exist.

There’s a third possible response, and that’s that there’s a new culture all around us.

We just don’t register it as culture. . . . We’re witnessing the rise of new forms of cultural expression. If these new forms aren’t dismissed by critics, it’s because most of them don’t even register as relevant. Or maybe because they can’t even perceive them.

— Katherine Dee, No, Culture Is Not Stuck
Wisdom of Crowds (4 October 2024).

1. ^[1][Everyone? Nah. Come on. —R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][For what it’s worth, this latter is actually the response I’m most often inclined to give when I hear this kind of stock complaints about, say, television and film: I don’t even know what people are talking about, unless it’s just to say that they’re tired of going to the movies and so can’t be arsed to find movies to go see. If you’re tired of superhero movies or Star Wars series or whatever, well, that’s fine; don’t watch that stuff. There’s a ton of weird, non-franchised, stylistically varied and highly idiosyncratic movies and series coming out every year. You don’t have to be some hipster bastard digging through the bottom of search results to find it; just make the effort to go to an arthouse theater or watch the foreign films up for an Oscar this year or whatever. Last year’s Best Picture nominees were wildly divergent, artistically ambitious, ranged from quietly meditative reflections on midlife regret to alt-Victorian Living Dead Girl picaresques and practical-effect atomic bomb explosions, and more or less all were completely different from the sort of genre pictures that the Stuck Culture bellyachers routinely and absurdly claim to be all-devouring and inescapable. I take Katherine Dee’s point in this essay that there’s also a lot of other stuff to look at; but it also just seems like the core complaint about stuckness hardly ever really reflects the real range of activity in the cultural medium alleged to be stuck. It’s not even prima facie compelling after a moment’s thought about what you could find in fifteen minutes’ worth of looking. —R.G.]↩