Alexander Wirth

@anish_koka @readwise save thread

There is a story that gets told about American healthcare -- The story goes like this: American healthcare is uniquely broken, uniquely inequitable, uniquely cruel to the most vulnerable. Our peer nations have figured out what we have not. Only problem: the story is made up.🧵

@khalidi79397 @readwise save

The idea that being “indigenous” automatically grants moral ownership of land collapses the moment you look at actual human history and apply a consistent moral standard to it. Long before Europeans arrived, Native American tribes fought, displaced, absorbed, and sometimes wiped out other tribes. The Iroquois Confederacy expanded by crushing rivals. The Aztec Empire grew through conquest, coercion, and tribute. Entire peoples vanished not because of outsiders, but because stronger neighbors took their land. This was not an exception. It was the rule. Morality cannot selectively ignore facts. If land was already changing hands through violence and domination, then “who was there first” cannot logically create an eternal moral claim. A past act of conquest does not become morally sacred simply because enough time has passed. This is not a uniquely American story. It is the story of Homo sapiens everywhere. Humans migrate, compete, conquer, assimilate, and redraw borders. Always have. Always will. No population on earth holds land because history peacefully granted it moral title. Land is held because, at some point, power determined the outcome. Modern moral legitimacy therefore cannot come from ancestry alone. It comes from present responsibility. From how societies govern today, how rights are protected today, and how power is exercised now. Morality applies to living systems, not frozen historical snapshots chosen for political convenience. “Indigenous” is not a scientific or ethical category. It is a political one. It freezes history at a convenient moment and declares that everything before that moment does not count. Who decides that moment? Whoever benefits from it. If you rewind history far enough, every group was once indigenous. If you stop history early enough, every conqueror can reinvent themselves as a victim. Moral arguments about land that ignore this reality are not about justice. They are about power, timing, and narrative control.

@umichbball Charge

Trey came in clutch down the stretch!

@LocasaleLab @readwise save

Academia already did what you’re proposing. Universities are now run like businesses with professional administrators, branding strategies, risk management, consultants, and KPI dashboards. The result hasn’t been better research or teaching. It’s been the transformation of universities into brand-management and lifestyle companies, where prestige, expansion, and revenue extraction matter more than scholarship or education. Research and teaching don’t reliably maximize short-term financial returns, so they get crowded out. What grows instead is administration because once an administrative class is established, its primary function becomes self-preservation and expansion, not mission fulfillment. This is exactly what happens when a nonprofit adopts corporate logic without corporate accountability. You don’t get efficiency. You get mission drift and an institution optimized to look successful rather than to be successful.