Broadly agree with you on these, but with some fleshing out explanations.
Cuba is kept poor from within, not from without. It trades with other countries already. That being said, a review of the embargo’s scope is warranted, but not removal entirely
There’s a lot of nuance to the fossil fuels. It’s not about power generation and transport, but the derived plastics industries that make modern life possible. If there’s to be a lowering of prices for goods and a resurgence in USA manufacturing, then this area is where it will happen, not by diktat. The power and transport uses are just bonuses. The replacement of reliable and cheap with unreliable and expensive just leads to energy poverty. This is not to say that environmental regulations need to go, far from it. Just have a more measured approach to industry in general and net benefits. (Disclosure: decades of experience in these sectors, including large and small scale renewables development)
Regarding the border, immigration, and terrorist classifications, that’s basically to give broader powers of surveillance and response. With family on the southern border, I can assure you both the pro and anti camps are quite wrong in the local context. Again, there’s nuance to be had here. The gangs are subhuman and need to be eradicated in all ways. Similarly their victims deserve sympathy. But the status quo is making it worse. Holman et al should improve things while implementing the policies judiciously.
Ironically, your first grouping are the ones I feel will reap the most benefits overall. Superficially minor though they may be.
As for the gender woo woo, they’re all basically claiming they’re special without doing anything worthy of being considered as such. DEI is the parent of this, and shares the same undeserving special classification. Let’s just get back to basic merit assessments and competency.
Unless Dems are brutally honest about why they p*seed off blue collar voters on marginal issues like gender we are never gonna win back power. We died on the Hill of nonsense.
You realize who it was that spent millions on gender ads, right? It wasn’t the Democratic Party that put these vulnerable populations at the forefront of their campaign.
Republicans literally played video of Democrat candidates running their mouths supporting gender reassignment surgery for trans people who were in prison. This was their best attack ad in the entire campaign. How do you think this played in working class households across America ?
I only saw a video of Kamala Harris from some years ago (2019, I think). After that, the Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads attacking transgender people. Absolutely psychotic, if you ask me.
A great piece to start my day. I appreciate the emphasis on reason vs. partisan rhetoric, and the nuance.
Here are some thoughts I have on the executive orders.
Agree about most of the ones you like or didn't care about. I'm all for returning to the standard two gender model, and eliminating DEI.
I'm fine that he pardoned the Jan 6 protesters, despite the fact they were morons and at the time I thought we ought to have told them "if you enter this building you will be shot" and followed through. What government permits citizens to raid a building the lawmakers are in? But the prosecutions were political theater, as was the entire "insurrection" narrative. As an aside, shooting looters during BLM "protests" would be fine too.
I am strongly in favor of stopping unmanaged immigration, but not big on deporting people who are already here unless they are committing crimes. Too severe for those folks, let's just stop the inflow.
You didn't mention it but the whole bit about the Gulf of America is nonsense and I'd prefer Trump dropped it.
And huge agree about Cuba, sanctions just punish the citizens there. Sad that Trump has reinstated them.
Regarding shooting BLM "protesters" being fine, I was one of those. I attended a daytime protest during which no violence was committed. At one point the protest organizer even stopped to help out an unrelated arrest.
I just want to clarify, is this the sort of event you're talking about, or the ones where people were setting cars on fire?
It is sort of a genera emotive comment. I don't object to protesters but I despise looters, arsonists, etc. no matter what their cause and my gut reaction is just shoot those bastards. I suppose that if I were making the actual policy I'd have to reign that in somewhat.
she goes through a lot of context but the general argument is that the subordinate clause "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" cannot just mean "subject to the laws thereof" or it would be redundant. instead it plausibly means "not owing allegiance to any foreign power".
also i've read you for some years now (appreciate your writing!) & think you would appreciate the arguments in epstein's fossil future & koonin's unsettled
Epstein seems like a crank but lots of smart people take him seriously so maybe I need to give him a second look. I just can't take seriously objectivists.
Alex Epstein’s arguments completely changed my mind on fossil fuels. I thought he would be a crank too (so did Bryan Caplan before he read him), but after reading his blog articles, watching interviews, watching debates, and then reading his book, I changed my mind. I could tell even from a layperson’s perspective that his opponents can’t reasonably respond to his arguments. His critiques of even mainstream organizations like the IPCC for ignoring basic, uncontroversial energy science about fossil fuels were devastating (embarrassingly so, actually) and he has now made me realize that restricting fossil fuels is actually dangerous and would start an energy crisis on a level that would kill a lot of people. He also does a good job critiquing studies that say that fossil fuels kill millions of people and all that stuff. I highly recommend him. Here’s an article where he summarizes his book: https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/the-irrefutable-case-for-a-fossil
you really should get out of David Friedman, Michael Huemer, and Bryan Caplan type stuff. These guys have not even convinced the bleeding heart libertarians like Kevin Vallier toward full libertarian capitalism, and even though many philosophers like Huemer's work on epistemology, meta-ethics, and normative ethics, they are not convinced by his anarcho-capitalism. I talked with Kevin and he says he liked Huemer's book but it was not actually groundbreaking or anything like that.
And I tagged David to see his interaction with his critics and David just came and said he is in the minority among the economists and I asked him given all the criticisms he is seeing at that subreddit, what are his thoughts? Did his view change on welfare state and he just asserted 'no' without explaining at all. And that made me eventually (after some months) lose confidence on his "anarcho-capitalism."
The reason to doubt this is that it's weird that it took over a century for anyone to deduce the true meaning of the 14th Amendment, and everyone was reading it wrong the whole time. This argument always smells like the Roe v. Wade argument that x actually always secured y, but nobody ever noticed before now, including the people who wrote x.
> It’s particularly immoral to deny citizenship to an asylum or refugee fleeing serious danger—what gives us the right to use military force to keep a poor war-torn Syrian trapped in hellish and dangerous conditions?
Syria doesn't border the US. In order to get to your country, a Syrian would typically pass through multiple countries that aren't war-torn, hellish, or particularly dangerous. The same applies to many other groups of immigrants.
1.Declaring that there are two genders. Generally good. I think pushing back the gender ideologies commonly found will reduce the amount of people caught up in them, which is plainly good for those people.
2. Rolling back DEI. Extremely good. LBJ's executive order 11246 affected huge swaths of the economy. Having built-in racial preferences is not only illegal, but also leads to continued racial resentment, due to classifying and playing people off against one another. This should also allow our economy to be more efficient, if companies don't need to worry about representation, but can instead just look to merit. Richard Hanania's done some good work chronicling the effects of all this.
3. DOGE-moderately favorable, but I'm skeptical as to whether it'll be able to do anything. Our government is horrendously inefficient and expensive in doing things. Elon has a ton of great experience in running things and trimming unnecessary things, so I imagine he could well at this. But I don't know that anyone will listen.
4-6. I concur with Matthew's takes on these including uncertainty about whether or to what extent they are good.
Next, to the orders Matthew doesn't like:
7. National emergency, January 6th. I would have preferred fewer January 6th pardons, but it's hard for me to complain about this following the Biden lame duck pardoning spree. That said, a bunch of people were convicted for far worse than they actually did. I would have preferred more commutations to smaller sentences (which I think he also did in a few instances?). But I agree, declaring a national emergency is bad, though it's (unfortunately) a fairly normal thing for governments to do. We have way too many national emergencies supposedly ongoing right now, under different acts.
8. I don't really have opinions on embargoing Cuba. But I'm sad that we'll be preventing immigration from Cuba, as Cuban immigrants are famously Republican-aligned.
9. Reinstating tiktok is bad, both for the reasons Matthew cites, and for national security.
10. I don't really have opinions regarding the cartels. I'm not informed enough.
11. I'm cautiously positive on immigration restrictions. It's very important for our continued prosperity to keep America America, and to do so, we need people immigrating at a rate that and in a way that people are able to assimilate into American culture. The level of illegal immigration under Biden was excessive, and it would be good to reduce that. That said, immigrants definitely can be net good for the economy.
12.Pulling out of WHO. Sounds bad to me. I'd want to hear what the arguments for doing so were.
13. Cutting off foreign aid. Probably bad. I'd want to check two things, though: first, does the foreign aid distort their economies in harmful ways? And second, will this help Trump in his negotiating tactics to any large extent? Either of those being yes, would help, but I'm generally not a huge fan. We definitely need to cut spending, but what we really need to do for that is go after social security and medicare, which will, sadly, not be happening until they go bankrupt.
14. I'm optimistic on fossil fuels. Reducing energy costs will make everything cheaper, which is good for the economy and makes us all richer. Frankly, I find Matthew's reasoning in this region uncharacteristically shoddy, as he's not really considering the obviously benefits, and is not considering the marginal impact of this upon climate change, but only addresses the large absolute benefits. If Matthew wanted to write something persuasive here, his analysis should have involved an estimate of how big of an effect the use of those fossil fuels would result. You can't do a cost-benefit analysis while working out neither the marginal cost nor the marginal benefit.
Also, regarding wild animal suffering—Matthew, I'd be very interested to hear how you consider the population ethics there. Is more wild animals good or bad? Should we be culling animals with a sufficiently low quality of life?
Good article, I mostly agree with everything you said. I will say though that I doubt a TikTok ban would actually help much re: teens' mental health. More American teens use Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts than TikTok now anyway, so I expect that a ban would just cause more people to switch over, rather than a decline in the number of people consuming this garbage content.
Maybe this issue isn't getting any airtime inside the US, but I'd think that average Americans would not be too excited about huge tariffs making nearly everything more expensive until all manufacturing/farming/resource extraction is done domestically, and even then, who knows if prices will ever go down.
We’ll put up with it so long as it reasonably seems like it’s going to create more jobs here. But otherwise yeah. We’re by default a free-trade nation.
99% of immigrants are economic migrants, including those claiming asylum. Do you have any suggestions for legally distinguishing or is your only solution open borders?
It’s not immoral for them to migrate. It is immoral for the government to force it on its citizens, the majority of who don’t want open borders. The point of governments are to work for their citizens interests.
Say that the government was able to immediately magically deport all migrants back to their home countries and the price of many basic commodities tripled. Would that really be in their citizen's interest?
"Say that the government was able to immediately magically deport all migrants back to their home countries and the price of many basic commodities tripled. Would that really be in their citizen's interest?"
If that actually happened, then citizens could discuss it in the next election, instead of the government presumptively deciding for them that it can't be allowed to happen.
They're the CITIZENS; their interests matter far more than migrants that can simply claim asylum (many of which will be wrong, anyway) in order to settle amongst citizens of a country.
At least, consider that the migrants could be wrong instead of going straight to the citizens who are meant to be protected.
If you look at the polls, the citizens have nonsensical beliefs. They want their taxes cut, and their government more capable. The citizens want their free speech to be protected, and others' hate speech to be banned.
They want no illegal immigrants. And they also hate inflation.
Obviously I wasn’t giving a precise number. A DHS official said 80% of asylum seekers are denied, and that doesn’t include other immigrants. Obviously if you can stay in the country by just saying the magic word asylum, people who don’t have a case are going to outnumber those who do.
But of course that’s not the real issue here. You just don’t think government should really care about what it’s citizens. And yes, governments should do what their citizens want and not just assume they know better because that’s tyrannical.
It seems you're a deontologist, at least when it comes to democracy. Why not just switch to a direct democracy, then, where the government just follows the laws decided directly by the citizens?
The Founders of America didn't want that, but it appears you do.
Generally speaking, I think the primary object that a government should have in mind is the wellbeing of its citizenry. Direct democracy is not always conducive to that.
I don't have anything to back me up, but my impression matches Brandon on what the population of immigrants are like. At the very least, a great many of them are not coming directly to the US, but are coming through other relatively safe countries on the way. I have no problem with them wanting to be here, and think that the right-leaning side probably underappreciates their economic benefits, but I don't think that most asylum claims are genuine, especially when there exist a bunch of nonprofits attempting to streamline the system to have people say the right things to be able to get in. (I'm unsure what the ideal level of immigration is—more people is ordinarily economically good for the average citizen, but the destruction of American culture would be very bad, seeing as we're way more prosperous and successful than anywhere else, and I don't want to end up like the other countries. There probably should be more emphasis on assimilation.)
When I see people say “99%”, it’s usually meant to not be taken literally. But that’s beside the point.
I don’t want a direct democracy because it would be bad. Just because I think the government should serve its citizens doesn’t mean I disregard bad consequences. It’s a balance.
Is there an EO allowing AI to access anything on the internet that is publicly visible for any use including training? (The Tech Bros must have thought of this...)
Apart from the obvious commercial advantage to USA, it'd be the first step towards giving AI human rights.
Nice article, good points all around. I struggle with the R-strategist hate. I definitely understand it’s basis but find some of the conclusions strange. Question: in an imagined prehistory when Humans had more children, presumably for similar reasons as present day R strategists reacting to harsher environments from climate change, is the marginal human birth undesired from an R-strategist hater pov? Or what’s the utility EV calculation that determines the cutoff where an R-strategist hater should be concerned. Thanks.
Evidence that the tuna eggs die painfully? Patently they don't if they don't make it past the egg stage. Even thereafter evolution may not be kind but it also isn't pointlessly cruel. Pain is the switch for various behaviours ranging in humans from flinching to running or screaming or fighting for one's life. If the young tuna's response range only goes up to 1 on the dial why would it's pain range be 1 to 10?
Broadly agree with you on these, but with some fleshing out explanations.
Cuba is kept poor from within, not from without. It trades with other countries already. That being said, a review of the embargo’s scope is warranted, but not removal entirely
There’s a lot of nuance to the fossil fuels. It’s not about power generation and transport, but the derived plastics industries that make modern life possible. If there’s to be a lowering of prices for goods and a resurgence in USA manufacturing, then this area is where it will happen, not by diktat. The power and transport uses are just bonuses. The replacement of reliable and cheap with unreliable and expensive just leads to energy poverty. This is not to say that environmental regulations need to go, far from it. Just have a more measured approach to industry in general and net benefits. (Disclosure: decades of experience in these sectors, including large and small scale renewables development)
Regarding the border, immigration, and terrorist classifications, that’s basically to give broader powers of surveillance and response. With family on the southern border, I can assure you both the pro and anti camps are quite wrong in the local context. Again, there’s nuance to be had here. The gangs are subhuman and need to be eradicated in all ways. Similarly their victims deserve sympathy. But the status quo is making it worse. Holman et al should improve things while implementing the policies judiciously.
Ironically, your first grouping are the ones I feel will reap the most benefits overall. Superficially minor though they may be.
As for the gender woo woo, they’re all basically claiming they’re special without doing anything worthy of being considered as such. DEI is the parent of this, and shares the same undeserving special classification. Let’s just get back to basic merit assessments and competency.
The embargo prevents US interests from supporting Cuban ones. Why support something antithetical to your own ideals?
And yes, other countries can still trade, just not using US services. There’s no interdiction or physical blockade there.
Like I said earlier, it should be reviewed.
Good article.
Unless Dems are brutally honest about why they p*seed off blue collar voters on marginal issues like gender we are never gonna win back power. We died on the Hill of nonsense.
You realize who it was that spent millions on gender ads, right? It wasn’t the Democratic Party that put these vulnerable populations at the forefront of their campaign.
Republicans literally played video of Democrat candidates running their mouths supporting gender reassignment surgery for trans people who were in prison. This was their best attack ad in the entire campaign. How do you think this played in working class households across America ?
I only saw a video of Kamala Harris from some years ago (2019, I think). After that, the Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads attacking transgender people. Absolutely psychotic, if you ask me.
A great piece to start my day. I appreciate the emphasis on reason vs. partisan rhetoric, and the nuance.
Here are some thoughts I have on the executive orders.
Agree about most of the ones you like or didn't care about. I'm all for returning to the standard two gender model, and eliminating DEI.
I'm fine that he pardoned the Jan 6 protesters, despite the fact they were morons and at the time I thought we ought to have told them "if you enter this building you will be shot" and followed through. What government permits citizens to raid a building the lawmakers are in? But the prosecutions were political theater, as was the entire "insurrection" narrative. As an aside, shooting looters during BLM "protests" would be fine too.
I am strongly in favor of stopping unmanaged immigration, but not big on deporting people who are already here unless they are committing crimes. Too severe for those folks, let's just stop the inflow.
You didn't mention it but the whole bit about the Gulf of America is nonsense and I'd prefer Trump dropped it.
And huge agree about Cuba, sanctions just punish the citizens there. Sad that Trump has reinstated them.
Oh, agreed on WHO, TikTok, and foreign aid.
Regarding shooting BLM "protesters" being fine, I was one of those. I attended a daytime protest during which no violence was committed. At one point the protest organizer even stopped to help out an unrelated arrest.
I just want to clarify, is this the sort of event you're talking about, or the ones where people were setting cars on fire?
https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/protests/oceanside-white-teen-knife-during-black-lives-matter-protes/509-4ee8f653-bb9d-48c7-abc3-5d0de229d5fb
It is sort of a genera emotive comment. I don't object to protesters but I despise looters, arsonists, etc. no matter what their cause and my gut reaction is just shoot those bastards. I suppose that if I were making the actual policy I'd have to reign that in somewhat.
vast disagreement. but as to the constitutionality of the 14th, there's good reason to think it will be upheld. swearer had a good paper on this some years ago: https://static.heritage.org/legal-and-judicial/birthright-citizenship/Law%20Review%20Final%20Print.pdf
she goes through a lot of context but the general argument is that the subordinate clause "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" cannot just mean "subject to the laws thereof" or it would be redundant. instead it plausibly means "not owing allegiance to any foreign power".
also i've read you for some years now (appreciate your writing!) & think you would appreciate the arguments in epstein's fossil future & koonin's unsettled
Epstein seems like a crank but lots of smart people take him seriously so maybe I need to give him a second look. I just can't take seriously objectivists.
Alex Epstein’s arguments completely changed my mind on fossil fuels. I thought he would be a crank too (so did Bryan Caplan before he read him), but after reading his blog articles, watching interviews, watching debates, and then reading his book, I changed my mind. I could tell even from a layperson’s perspective that his opponents can’t reasonably respond to his arguments. His critiques of even mainstream organizations like the IPCC for ignoring basic, uncontroversial energy science about fossil fuels were devastating (embarrassingly so, actually) and he has now made me realize that restricting fossil fuels is actually dangerous and would start an energy crisis on a level that would kill a lot of people. He also does a good job critiquing studies that say that fossil fuels kill millions of people and all that stuff. I highly recommend him. Here’s an article where he summarizes his book: https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/the-irrefutable-case-for-a-fossil
Yeah... no, https://slate.com/technology/2022/05/alex-epstein-fossil-future-climate-change-argument.html
you really should get out of David Friedman, Michael Huemer, and Bryan Caplan type stuff. These guys have not even convinced the bleeding heart libertarians like Kevin Vallier toward full libertarian capitalism, and even though many philosophers like Huemer's work on epistemology, meta-ethics, and normative ethics, they are not convinced by his anarcho-capitalism. I talked with Kevin and he says he liked Huemer's book but it was not actually groundbreaking or anything like that.
I also was interacting with askeconomics subreddit one time and I posted this - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/18swop8/is_economist_david_friedman_correct_that/
And I tagged David to see his interaction with his critics and David just came and said he is in the minority among the economists and I asked him given all the criticisms he is seeing at that subreddit, what are his thoughts? Did his view change on welfare state and he just asserted 'no' without explaining at all. And that made me eventually (after some months) lose confidence on his "anarcho-capitalism."
The reason to doubt this is that it's weird that it took over a century for anyone to deduce the true meaning of the 14th Amendment, and everyone was reading it wrong the whole time. This argument always smells like the Roe v. Wade argument that x actually always secured y, but nobody ever noticed before now, including the people who wrote x.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZeOvFCtRp8
> It’s particularly immoral to deny citizenship to an asylum or refugee fleeing serious danger—what gives us the right to use military force to keep a poor war-torn Syrian trapped in hellish and dangerous conditions?
Syria doesn't border the US. In order to get to your country, a Syrian would typically pass through multiple countries that aren't war-torn, hellish, or particularly dangerous. The same applies to many other groups of immigrants.
Here are my thoughts:
1.Declaring that there are two genders. Generally good. I think pushing back the gender ideologies commonly found will reduce the amount of people caught up in them, which is plainly good for those people.
2. Rolling back DEI. Extremely good. LBJ's executive order 11246 affected huge swaths of the economy. Having built-in racial preferences is not only illegal, but also leads to continued racial resentment, due to classifying and playing people off against one another. This should also allow our economy to be more efficient, if companies don't need to worry about representation, but can instead just look to merit. Richard Hanania's done some good work chronicling the effects of all this.
3. DOGE-moderately favorable, but I'm skeptical as to whether it'll be able to do anything. Our government is horrendously inefficient and expensive in doing things. Elon has a ton of great experience in running things and trimming unnecessary things, so I imagine he could well at this. But I don't know that anyone will listen.
4-6. I concur with Matthew's takes on these including uncertainty about whether or to what extent they are good.
Next, to the orders Matthew doesn't like:
7. National emergency, January 6th. I would have preferred fewer January 6th pardons, but it's hard for me to complain about this following the Biden lame duck pardoning spree. That said, a bunch of people were convicted for far worse than they actually did. I would have preferred more commutations to smaller sentences (which I think he also did in a few instances?). But I agree, declaring a national emergency is bad, though it's (unfortunately) a fairly normal thing for governments to do. We have way too many national emergencies supposedly ongoing right now, under different acts.
8. I don't really have opinions on embargoing Cuba. But I'm sad that we'll be preventing immigration from Cuba, as Cuban immigrants are famously Republican-aligned.
9. Reinstating tiktok is bad, both for the reasons Matthew cites, and for national security.
10. I don't really have opinions regarding the cartels. I'm not informed enough.
11. I'm cautiously positive on immigration restrictions. It's very important for our continued prosperity to keep America America, and to do so, we need people immigrating at a rate that and in a way that people are able to assimilate into American culture. The level of illegal immigration under Biden was excessive, and it would be good to reduce that. That said, immigrants definitely can be net good for the economy.
12.Pulling out of WHO. Sounds bad to me. I'd want to hear what the arguments for doing so were.
13. Cutting off foreign aid. Probably bad. I'd want to check two things, though: first, does the foreign aid distort their economies in harmful ways? And second, will this help Trump in his negotiating tactics to any large extent? Either of those being yes, would help, but I'm generally not a huge fan. We definitely need to cut spending, but what we really need to do for that is go after social security and medicare, which will, sadly, not be happening until they go bankrupt.
14. I'm optimistic on fossil fuels. Reducing energy costs will make everything cheaper, which is good for the economy and makes us all richer. Frankly, I find Matthew's reasoning in this region uncharacteristically shoddy, as he's not really considering the obviously benefits, and is not considering the marginal impact of this upon climate change, but only addresses the large absolute benefits. If Matthew wanted to write something persuasive here, his analysis should have involved an estimate of how big of an effect the use of those fossil fuels would result. You can't do a cost-benefit analysis while working out neither the marginal cost nor the marginal benefit.
Also, regarding wild animal suffering—Matthew, I'd be very interested to hear how you consider the population ethics there. Is more wild animals good or bad? Should we be culling animals with a sufficiently low quality of life?
Good article, I mostly agree with everything you said. I will say though that I doubt a TikTok ban would actually help much re: teens' mental health. More American teens use Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts than TikTok now anyway, so I expect that a ban would just cause more people to switch over, rather than a decline in the number of people consuming this garbage content.
Still likely to be some decline.
Curious what you make of Brian Tomasik’s note on how there are two plausible mitigating factors to the possibility that climate change causes more r-selection: https://reducing-suffering.org/climate-change-and-wild-animals/#Greater_r-selection
I suspect I’m considerably less confident than you in Glenn’s thesis on climate change’s effects on wild animal suffering.
Maybe this issue isn't getting any airtime inside the US, but I'd think that average Americans would not be too excited about huge tariffs making nearly everything more expensive until all manufacturing/farming/resource extraction is done domestically, and even then, who knows if prices will ever go down.
We’ll put up with it so long as it reasonably seems like it’s going to create more jobs here. But otherwise yeah. We’re by default a free-trade nation.
99% of immigrants are economic migrants, including those claiming asylum. Do you have any suggestions for legally distinguishing or is your only solution open borders?
That's a high number. Where are you getting that number?
Also is wanting to immigrate for economic reasons morally wrong?
It’s not immoral for them to migrate. It is immoral for the government to force it on its citizens, the majority of who don’t want open borders. The point of governments are to work for their citizens interests.
You forgot to say where you got that number from.
But what if the citizens are wrong?
Say that the government was able to immediately magically deport all migrants back to their home countries and the price of many basic commodities tripled. Would that really be in their citizen's interest?
"Say that the government was able to immediately magically deport all migrants back to their home countries and the price of many basic commodities tripled. Would that really be in their citizen's interest?"
If that actually happened, then citizens could discuss it in the next election, instead of the government presumptively deciding for them that it can't be allowed to happen.
“But what if the citizens are wrong?”
They're the CITIZENS; their interests matter far more than migrants that can simply claim asylum (many of which will be wrong, anyway) in order to settle amongst citizens of a country.
At least, consider that the migrants could be wrong instead of going straight to the citizens who are meant to be protected.
If you look at the polls, the citizens have nonsensical beliefs. They want their taxes cut, and their government more capable. The citizens want their free speech to be protected, and others' hate speech to be banned.
They want no illegal immigrants. And they also hate inflation.
One thing leads to the other.
Obviously I wasn’t giving a precise number. A DHS official said 80% of asylum seekers are denied, and that doesn’t include other immigrants. Obviously if you can stay in the country by just saying the magic word asylum, people who don’t have a case are going to outnumber those who do.
But of course that’s not the real issue here. You just don’t think government should really care about what it’s citizens. And yes, governments should do what their citizens want and not just assume they know better because that’s tyrannical.
This was non-obvious to me! I thought you were giving a precise number! How was I to know you weren't?
Beware the illusion of transparency, my friend. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sSqoEw9eRP2kPKLCz/illusion-of-transparency-why-no-one-understands-you
It seems you're a deontologist, at least when it comes to democracy. Why not just switch to a direct democracy, then, where the government just follows the laws decided directly by the citizens?
The Founders of America didn't want that, but it appears you do.
Generally speaking, I think the primary object that a government should have in mind is the wellbeing of its citizenry. Direct democracy is not always conducive to that.
I don't have anything to back me up, but my impression matches Brandon on what the population of immigrants are like. At the very least, a great many of them are not coming directly to the US, but are coming through other relatively safe countries on the way. I have no problem with them wanting to be here, and think that the right-leaning side probably underappreciates their economic benefits, but I don't think that most asylum claims are genuine, especially when there exist a bunch of nonprofits attempting to streamline the system to have people say the right things to be able to get in. (I'm unsure what the ideal level of immigration is—more people is ordinarily economically good for the average citizen, but the destruction of American culture would be very bad, seeing as we're way more prosperous and successful than anywhere else, and I don't want to end up like the other countries. There probably should be more emphasis on assimilation.)
When I see people say “99%”, it’s usually meant to not be taken literally. But that’s beside the point.
I don’t want a direct democracy because it would be bad. Just because I think the government should serve its citizens doesn’t mean I disregard bad consequences. It’s a balance.
Is there an EO allowing AI to access anything on the internet that is publicly visible for any use including training? (The Tech Bros must have thought of this...)
Apart from the obvious commercial advantage to USA, it'd be the first step towards giving AI human rights.
could you clarify the edit about what alyssa vance said?
Nice article, good points all around. I struggle with the R-strategist hate. I definitely understand it’s basis but find some of the conclusions strange. Question: in an imagined prehistory when Humans had more children, presumably for similar reasons as present day R strategists reacting to harsher environments from climate change, is the marginal human birth undesired from an R-strategist hater pov? Or what’s the utility EV calculation that determines the cutoff where an R-strategist hater should be concerned. Thanks.
What do you think of Richard epstein on fossil fuels?
chat are we cooked
Evidence that the tuna eggs die painfully? Patently they don't if they don't make it past the egg stage. Even thereafter evolution may not be kind but it also isn't pointlessly cruel. Pain is the switch for various behaviours ranging in humans from flinching to running or screaming or fighting for one's life. If the young tuna's response range only goes up to 1 on the dial why would it's pain range be 1 to 10?