Ilya’s Magic strategy consisted of stealing rares from his ten-year-old cousin, who was the only person he ever played with besides me. Soon, I started to beat him easily with my control deck. His parents didn’t seem to mind that he spent all day in his room playing video games, rather than improving himself—maybe that was why he was not as motivated as I was to get good at Magic. For my part, I developed an elaborate fantasy of myself as a tournament-level player, even though I still never joined any tournaments or played against anyone besides Ilya. Ilya thought I tried too hard and was scared of my mom.

By setting themselves against such legal structures, Berman argued, governments are able to position themselves as bold, resolute and courageous. As he noted in relation to Iraq, the Bush administration used such language to contrast itself to the conservative and timid structures of the international legal order. This enabled Bush to argue that – in invading Iraq – it was the US itself that embodied justice, as against recalcitrant international legal structures. Such behaviour is always a particular choice. Given the indeterminacy of (international) law, it will always be possible for state personnel to find some legal arguments with which to justify their behaviour. Even those states most condemned by the ‘international community’ tend to respond not by acknowledging the breach, or by impugning the institution, but rather by legally supporting their conduct. The turn to legitimacy by defiance therefore is always a political choice, as opposed to a response to a lack of availability of arguments, or a weak legal hand.

But teachers are not like medical practitioners and students are not like patients. Teachers try to enlist students in their cause; students might or might not join in. They might do their best to make sense of what the teachers seems to want, or pretend that they’re trying to, or subvert or resist the teacher’s efforts in myriad ways. Much of what students learn is not what is taught but what students think has been taught; often it has not been taught at all, for students learn all kinds of other things in the classroom and everywhere else at school. They learn about themselves, the world, how the world treats them, and how they can and should treat others. Students are, in other words, co-producers of learning, of themselves, and of each other. They learn, and they grow.

Foucault characterizes liberalism by a few fundamental nonideological features, chiefly affective in nature. This sort of analysis may appear disturbingly nonempirical or arbitrary for those accustomed to definitions of liberalism as a political regime or system of belief (or even as a “way of life” or ethics) rather than as a set of feelings. It has, nevertheless, a pedigree in the history of liberal thought. In The Spirit of Laws, the eighteenth-century French political philosopher Montesquieu revised Aristotle’s account of the differences among various forms of government to emphasize that despotic, monarchical, and republican states depend on and engender various emotional climates. Their political cultures, and the characters of their citizens, vary insofar as different affective mechanisms (e.g., fear, honor, virtue) circulate among rulers and ruled as the primary motivators of action. Montesquieu argued that despotism, the unlimited rule of a single tyrant, was a political form in which fear predominates. Foucault, however, complicates Montesquieu’s analysis by arguing that liberalism—which emerged in no small part out of Montesquieu’s critiques of despotism—is itself driven by a particular kind of fear, as well as concomitant or counterbalancing hopes.

While it mightn’t be the first impulse of most parents of funny, charismatic children to upload their lives to YouTube, Brooke and Justin Norris are not alone. Social media “kidfluencing”, which encompasses family vlogging and related practices, is a multi-billion-dollar industry. For the right families, it can be lucrative. After YouTube takes its cut, creators earn an estimated $15 to $45 AUD in ad revenue for every thousand views. The Norrises’ vlogs have amassed over two billion views, and the Bondi-based family is now worth over $30 million AUD. Long-time viewers have been privy to the unveiling of dream houses, apartments, and cars, and accompanied the Norrises on numerous holidays. Formerly the family’s sole breadwinner, Justin sold his business in 2020, the same year the channel reached five million subscribers. The sale marked a shift to complete financial dependence on the Norris Nuts brand — that is, on the children.