The News Thread

[Einherjar86]

I estimate that my posts are on point roughly 90% of the time.

Now, does this post fall in that 90%...?

 

[arg]

Trickle down economics works. Perhaps not as effective as we'd like, but certainly better than regulating and taxing the shit out of job creators.

 

[Dak]

I estimate that my posts are on point roughly 90% of the time.

Now, does this post fall in that 90%...?

Pretty sure I argued with you about how regulations were pro-big-business ad nauseum and you didn't think so.

 

[Einherjar86]

Huh, I don't remember that. I read Gabriel Kolko's 'Triumph of Conservatism' a few years back and I don't think I saw any reason to really doubt the argument. I especially don't now, from a more systems-theory perspective.

But I've had tons of different opinions on things I don't understand, so who knows.

 

[crimsonfloyd]

The only part you have right is the last part. Deportations aren't necessarily the best course of action, but it's only contingently a total waste(like if they come right back). The economy never really got out of recession, and even if you believe all the QE and zirp/nirp mean it has, it's still going back in officially whether or not there's a crackdown on illegals. I can't help you with your notions of blame and guilt, Haidt says I can only try to understand.

So you're argument is the US never got out of the recession, so what's another $400 billion in frivolous spending, which would dig us a deeper hole? Who cares if the GDP drops by 1.6 trillion? We're already in a recession, might as well fuck ourselves even more! I can't believe how fiscally irrepsonible and economically naive you and other supporters of mass deportation are.

Experts predict the impact on the economy would be comperable to the 2008 recession. For example, do you realize that you're talking about removing almost 1/6 of the nation's agriculture workforce? You don't just magically move in all the unemployed citzens into those jobs without a hitch. Moreover, it's unclear that there even is an extant replacement workforce for all these jobs. What do you think that's gonna mean when you take your family to the grocery store?

As for the ethical dimension, I didn't think that would really matter to you, but I do find it strange that as a father, you feel nothing about tearing families apart. Put yourself in their shoes. You live in poverty with few job opportunities. There are no plausible legal routes to reaching America. You want to be able to put food on your family's table and provide your children with better educational opportunities. I think you're being naive to say you would never do what they've done if in the same situation.

 

[Dak]

So you're argument is the US never got out of the recession, so what's another $400 billion in frivolous spending, which would dig us a deeper hole? Who cares if the GDP drops by 1.6 trillion? We're already in a recession, might as well fuck ourselves even more! I can't believe how fiscally irrepsonible and economically naive you and other supporters of mass deportation are.

Experts predict the impact on the economy would be comperable to the 2008 recession. For example, do you realize that you're talking about removing almost 1/6 of the nation's agriculture workforce? You don't just magically move in all the unemployed citzens into those jobs without a hitch. Moreover, it's unclear that there even is an extant replacement workforce for all these jobs. What do you think that's gonna mean when you take your family to the grocery store?

Experts predict all sorts of things with poor results:

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.tw/2014/01/the-limits-of-expertise.html

Tetlock's experts came from all sorts of backgrounds: included were media personalities, tenured academics, professional analysts in Washington think tanks, and employees of numerous government agencies (including those with access to classified materials). A wide range of political beliefs and styles of analysis were also included: the study included both registered Republicans and Democrats, Austrian economists and their Keynesian counterparts, specialists in game theory, realist IR, area studies, and every other analytic model that gained popularity during the test period. What were the results of their 82,000 predictions?

"The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

I think you have no understanding of basic principles of things like supply and demand, and how that relates to jobs, labor, and wages. I already said mass deportation isn't the best option, but amnesty certainly isn't. No one is even talking about overnight, magical removals. It's easy to knockdown strawmen, but it doesn't make for an entertaining or educational show.

As for the ethical dimension, I didn't think that would really matter to you, but I do find it strange that as a father, you feel nothing about tearing families apart. Put yourself in their shoes. You live in poverty with few job opportunities. There are no plausible legal routes to reaching America. You want to be able to put food on your family's table and provide your children with better educational opportunities. I think you're being naive to say you would never do what they've done if in the same situation.

I would advise you to try and arrange your argument into form and see where the errors are, never mind the appeal to feels. This is stuff you should be past with a good 1000 level logic and/or ethics course.

 

[crimsonfloyd]

I think you have no understanding of basic principles of things like supply and demand, and how that relates to jobs, labor, and wages. I already said mass deportation isn't the best option, but amnesty certainly isn't. No one is even talking about overnight, magical removals. It's easy to knockdown strawmen, but it doesn't make for an entertaining or educational show.

It's not a strawman. The man you're voting for president claims he can do it in 18 months. He's gonna get them out "so fast you're head will spin". If you don't want to defend strawmans, maybe you shouldn't vote for the idiot whose policies are so stupid that you mistake them for strawman arguments. You should certainly learn more about what he plans to do, as you're evidently uninformed.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/09/11/donald-trump-says-immigrant-deportations-done-in-two-years/

I would advise you to try and arrange your argument into form and see where the errors are, never mind the appeal to feels. This is stuff you should be past with a good 1000 level logic and/or ethics course.

I teach logic and have two Masters, including one in philosophy, so don't bother lecturing me on the basic of logic. If you don't have any specific responses to my argument, I'll consider this conversation over.

 

[Dak]

It's not a strawman. The man you're voting for president claims he can do it in 18 months. He's gonna get them out "so fast you're head will spin". If you don't want to defend strawmans, maybe you shouldn't vote for the idiot whose policies are so stupid that you mistake them for strawman arguments. You should certainly learn more about what he plans to do, as you're evidently uninformed.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/09/11/donald-trump-says-immigrant-deportations-done-in-two-years/

I don't vote bo. Haven't done so in over a decade. I don't take Trump's immigration promises seriously since it's not possible to "Get them out so fast it'll make heads spin". He could build a wall, and that would take some years. Trump also said this:

Trump continued, "With immigration, as with anything else, there always has to be some tug and pull and deal. ... You have to be able to have some flexibility, some negotiation."

I teach logic and have two Masters, including one in philosophy, so don't bother lecturing me on the basic of logic. If you don't have any specific responses to my argument, I'll consider this conversation over.

Appeal to authority to back up your appeal to emotion. Your degrees aren't doing you much good. It's probably best if it is over, I can't teach you anything your professors couldn't.

 

[Internally Deformed]

I don't buy two masters and a philosophy tenure from someone who's mistaken you're for your twice in as many posts, and spells comparable comperable. Just saying.

 

[crimsonfloyd]

I don't buy two masters and a philosophy tenure from someone who's mistaken you're for your twice in as many posts, and spells comparable comperable. Just saying.

Don't buy it then.

I've never been a great

I don't vote bo. Haven't done so in over a decade.

Yeah I was think of a post by TB.

I don't take Trump's immigration promises seriously since it's not possible to "Get them out so fast it'll make heads spin". He could build a wall, and that would take some years. Trump also said this:

There's no reason to not take them seriously. The dude's an authoritarian lunatic. Either way, his statement proves that my prior argument was not a strawman.

Appeal to authority to back up your appeal to emotion. Your degrees aren't doing you much good. It's probably best if it is over, I can't teach you anything your professors couldn't.

And your use of 101 logical fallcies shows thay you've taken an intro to critical thinking class and now think you're some sort of argumentative god.

Let me give you a mini lesson: asking you to consider a situation from someone else's perspective isn't an appeal to emotion. If my entire arguement was based on how sad it would be, then THAT would be an appeal to emtoion. Since I presented multiple evidence based arguments which you were incapable of responding to, your grasp at a falacy falls flat.

Moreover, I didn't even use the perspective point to argue that immigrants should be allowed to stay, but rather that one can understand why they do what they do. But they probably don't teach that level of nuance in 101.

 

[Dak]

There's no reason to not take them seriously. The dude's an authoritarian lunatic. Either way, his statement proves that my prior argument was not a strawman.

I gave a reason. Trump has a long history of backtracking. This feeds a common complaint about how he just says things for media attention.

And your use of 101 logical fallcies shows thay you've taken an intro to critical thinking class and now think you're some sort of argumentative god.

Let me give you a mini lesson: asking you to consider a situation from someone else's perspective isn't an appeal to emotion. If my entire arguement was based on how sad it would be, then THAT would be an appeal to emtoion. Since I presented multiple evidence based arguments which you were incapable of responding to, your grasp at a falacy falls flat.

Someone who thinks that sadness is the only emotion one can appeal to, and that an entire argument has to be fallacious to contain a fallacy, is telling me my grasp of fallacies falls flat. (How do grasps "fall flat"?)

Moreover, I didn't even use the perspective point to argue that immigrants should be allowed to stay, but rather that one can understand why they do what they do. But they probably don't teach that level of nuance in 101.

I haven't seen anyone (and certainly not me) say they don't know why illegals come here, or say it would be easy/painless for them to leave, so it is a strawman argument.

 

[Einherjar86]

Oh boy, ohhhhhhh boy...

Here's a piece written very recently by UChicago professor Lauren Berlant - radical feminist and affect theorist, all kinds of fancy-pants theory. Given all the talk of emotion recently, I thought this might be of interest for some. Link is below, but here's the opening:

Dear America, if I read one more article about the Danger of Political Emotions in an election season (I mean you, Paul Krugman), I might take my own life. If I do that and fail, will the state bring me up on charges the way it’s considering to do for Chelsea Manning, whose recent suicide attempt might be prosecuted?[1] If Obama has an ounce of decency in him he’ll make that possibility quietly go away.

If x had an ounce of decency, x would deliver justice. Such bad math, so emotional. But politics is always emotional. It is a scene where structural antagonisms—genuinely conflicting interests—are described in rhetoric that intensifies fantasy.

Here is the thesis of this piece, which is about the contemporary United States. People would like to feel free. They would like the world to have a generous cushion for all their aggression and inclination. They would like there to be a general plane of okayness governing social relations. It is hard for some to see that the “generous cushion for aggression” might conflict with the “general plane of okayness.”

When I listen to Donald Trump, I think he’s not wrong about some things, especially the awful neoliberal-Clintonian trade deals and bank deregulation that sold out the working class in the US because of a muddled idea that any wealth at all is a general social benefit. But Donald Trump is our current best exhibit of two other pretty solid truths about politics, thinking, and feeling.

One is: A Good Account of a Problem Predicts Absolutely Nothing About the Value of a Solution.

I am a professor. I have read three decades of essays that set up problems beautifully and then fall apart in the what is to be done section. Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism’s unfairness. Then what? Then Trump’s response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad. Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet—and this is key—the noise in his message increases the apparent value of what’s clear about it. The ways he’s right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the ways he’s blabbing. Plus, apart from rebooting capitalism, nobody in mainstream politics is that visionary about what to do, because everyone has to be patriotic toward capitalism, since that’s come to stand for freedom.

Two: the second thing about Trump is that Trump is free.

You watch him calculating, yet not seeming to care about the consequences of what he says, and you listen to his supporters enjoying the feel of his freedom. See the brilliant interviews on Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, where RNC conventioneers say, over and over: We’re for Trump because he’s not politically correct, PC has harmed America, and you think, people feel so unfree.[2]

Let’s sit with that.

Let's. In the meantime, here's the rest of the piece (fear not, it's short): https://supervalentthought.com/2016/08/04/trump-or-political-emotions/

 

[Internally Deformed]

and you listen to his supporters enjoying the feel of his freedom

This is bang on. I've been trying to explain to myself why despite being rationally afraid of Trump, I also sort of... enjoy him. This is why.

 

[arg]

There you have it

 

[Dak]

My psychology focus, recent readings, and personal experiences have all been severely disabusing me of any notions of something like homo economicus, or Kantian Rational Actors, or anything else that describes or even hopes to see humans acting with greater reason than emotion. Thinking/acting via reason is extremely difficulty even with relatively elevated cognitive powers, and practically impossible for the majority of people. As an aside to my eventual point here, this is a significant weakness of normative ethical philosophy in itself, prior to any specific theory weaknesses. Normative ethics require that one put in some at least quasi-rational thought. Liberal democracy, as conceived by political theorists, and as understood by the think-tankers, depends on some at least quasi-rational weighing of issues and vetting of candidates, news, sources, etc. How many people vet anything, much less seriously think about anything non-trivial or of simple existence relations, rationally or otherwise? Politics is driven by emotion like nearly everything else.

 

[crimsonfloyd]

I gave a reason. Trump has a long history of backtracking. This feeds a common complaint about how he just says things for media attention.

Since he's never been in political office, there's no foundation for this position. Is he saying it for media attention or because he believes it? What will he DO for media attention once he's in power? We simply don't know what he would do, and based on the things he says, that makes him absurdly dangerous.

Someone who thinks that sadness is the only emotion one can appeal to, and that an entire argument has to be fallacious to contain a fallacy, is telling me my grasp of fallacies falls flat. (How do grasps "fall flat"?)

I never said sadness was the only emotion one could appeal to, I provided it as an example. If one avoids all the legit points one makes and only focuses on the fallacy, then they really haven't responded to the bulk of the argument. That said, there was no fallacy. Go back and reread your 101 book.

I haven't seen anyone (and certainly not me) say they don't know why illegals come here, or say it would be easy/painless for them to leave, so it is a strawman argument.

Christ, you're like a kid who learned how to use a hammer and thinks its so cool that tries to use it to eat his cereal with it. Asking someone to consider someone else's perspective isn't a strawman. But again, you didn't have any real responses to my points, and haven't done anything in this discussion but focus on fringe aspects and reiterate unsupported counter-positions without providing an any alternative.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

Historically, they've been quite the boon to our economy. Presently, less so because of the fact that we're a post-industrial economy, but, nonetheless, on the whole they continue to contribute to our economy more than they take away from it through government programs, such as Medicaid and welfare, and commit crime at a lesser rate than other low-income Americans. The argument that immigrants are a plague to the nation has gone on for some hundred and fifty years in this country, but the numbers have never supported that argument.

 

[Dak]

Since he's never been in political office, there's no foundation for this position. Is he saying it for media attention or because he believes it? What will he DO for media attention once he's in power? We simply don't know what he would do, and based on the things he says, that makes him absurdly dangerous.

What is dangerous about deportations? Just the supposed hit to the economy? This is an argument you could trace out very simply, and could pull in various citations to support.

1. Trump says he will push for mass deportations
2. X experts say mass deportations will damage the economy.
C: Trump says he will push to damage the economy.

Maybe you have other ideas of how he would be dangerous as well.

I never said sadness was the only emotion one could appeal to, I provided it as an example.

Your statement was less than ambiguous in that regard but fine. An appeal to emotion though, does not require the entire argument to subsist of the fallacy.

If one avoids all the legit points one makes and only focuses on the fallacy, then they really haven't responded to the bulk of the argument. That said, there was no fallacy. Go back and reread your 101 book.

But again, you didn't have any real responses to my points

What points have you made? Trumps rhetoric and the pain of deportation for illegal immigrants are premises for an argument, not a conclusion. Formulating legitimate conclusions requires an absence of fallacies. But I'll back up to the last time you tried to make points and try again. I already addressed the economic aspects of deportation above so skipping that.

Moreover, it's unclear that there even is an extant replacement workforce for all these jobs.

http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/181469/big-lie-unemployment.aspx

Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older. We need that to be 50% and a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America's middle class.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...-trump-says-us-has-93-milion-people-out-work/

Out of the 93.8 million Americans age 16 and up who are deemed "not in the labor force," 9.7 million of them are between 16 and 19 years of age. Another 5.7 million are between 20 and 24. And 37.8 million are age 65 and over. (In fact, 17.5 million are over 75 years old.)

What’s left? This leaves 40.5 million Americans who are not in the labor force and are between the ages of 25 and 64. It’s possible to argue that this number should be a bit higher -- college typically ends at age 22, not everyone goes to college, and healthy seniors today can usually work past 65 if they wish. But right off the top, Trump’s claim significantly overstates the matter.

I would argue that plenty of the 16-24 year olds should be working, and that some work is healthy both mentally and physically for those already physically capable at 65+. But let's say the number is between 40 and 56 million. 12.5 to 17.5% unemployment. There are people out there that can be productive. We could even use Politifacts number: 21 million. How many jobs are possibly freed up by deportations? 11 million - if every single immigrant were working a job.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...nuing-nearly-decade-long-decline-report-says/

So there are (many) less jobs to be freed up than people needing work.

What do you think that's gonna mean when you take your family to the grocery store?

As for the ethical dimension, I didn't think that would really matter to you, but I do find it strange that as a father, you feel nothing about tearing families apart. Put yourself in their shoes. You live in poverty with few job opportunities. There are no plausible legal routes to reaching America. You want to be able to put food on your family's table and provide your children with better educational opportunities. I think you're being naive to say you would never do what they've done if in the same situation.

All irrelevant to the argument, which is to say a red herring, never mind the appeal to emotion. No point to be found here.


As another disclaimer: I don't vote. Even if I did it wouldn't be for Trump. Many of the negative things about Trump are true and generate valid concerns.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

The average public school student costs about $10k a year. Factor in that Hispanic migrant workers often get paid sub-minimum wage, and that they have more children than long-term Americans, and there's no way in hell that they're a net positive on our social system. A boon to produce farmers and other industries though, sure.

I'm not sure that they commit lower crime than the average American either. Legal immigrants do, but they're carefully selected over a long application period which generally favors skilled workers. The numbers are pretty hard to place exactly, since reporting on illegal immigrant crime is done inconsistently, but I'd be surprised if they're actually lower, especially since Hispanics on the whole commit crime roughly 2-3 times more than whites. One of the biggest reports states that in 2009 we had 25,000 illegal immigrants (mostly Hispanic) in our prisons for murder, which is a little high when we have roughly 200,000 people in prison for murder period, and when illegals supposedly make up roughly 3% of our population. That doesn't even factor in how it's harder to track illegals when they lack social security numbers, steady/easily-trackable employment, etc, and how their crimes may be under reported relative to those of citizens.

For what it's worth, I think Hispanic crime in general would plummet if we ended the war on drugs considering all the shit the gets brought up here, and how we've managed to create cartels with the strength of armies. It's not so much that Jose Fieldworker is more likely to be criminal or try intentionally leeching off of social services, as much as our virtually non-existent border security allows all types, good and bad, to come up here.

 

[Dak]

Trump broke down and endorsed John McCain. Does anyone really think this guy is anything more than a lot of talk?