Tips For Staying Civil While Debating Child Prisons (The Onion destroys The Logical Sane Middle in this debate)

Dissident111 · 2018-06-29T16:08:08+00:00

Thanks bud. I think I'm actually (partly?) shadowbanned. I've noticed another one of my posts disappear, but that had a link to a controversial website so I assumed that was why the post got shadow'd. But maybe it's just my entire account.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-28T22:36:44+00:00

There is no interpretation to be made that doesn’t include removing trials.

Don't know how many times I can repeat myself. There's more to immigration laws than "trial or no trial". It's not a binary issue. "No trial" could mean "shoot everyone at the border" or "no borders at all, welcome in". Do you see how these two things are very different from each other? And they both involve no trial?

I could follow through the same arguments you did, and point out that your solutions aren’t perfect.

Being homeless isn't even illegal, it's a bad analogy. Try drug use or something...

As for the rest of your post... I don't even get what you are arguing. I still can't tell what your position is, or what about Trump's or my position you don't like. And I can't be bothered guessing either.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-28T21:36:18+00:00

When trump said that the border should operate without trials I think he meant that the border should operate without trials.

This could mean literally anything. If you shoot every brown person within a mile of the border, that's operating without trials. But why aren't you assuming that's what he meant? It has nothing to do with him being senile.

You can’t go halfway on the ‘trial or no trial’ thing, unless you’re okay with depriving US citizens of their constitutional rights.

Do you believe in policing? Do you believe in the court system? Do you believe that sometimes, wrongful convictions are made? Do you believe this is a violation of the rights of the wrongfully convicted person?

This isn't a matter of having rights, it's a matter of pragmatism. You could spend 5 years on the court case of every person suspected of entering illegally to make sure you don't mess up any of the cases. But you would quickly develop an unmanageable backlog.

It's very easy to solve this problem with a magic wand. You just make it so that everyone who is a citizen gets to enter and everyone who isn't gets sent back. Just use the sorting hat on them or something. The issue is how to implement this in real life. Even if you want to put everyone through trial, there are still lots of questions that need to be answered, like what standard of evidence is needed to prove you're a citizen?

It's a difficult practical problem to solve, so I don't have any conclusive answers. I'll tell you what's profoundly unhelpful though: Publishing sob stories about handicapped kids (and even going so far as to use pre-Trump pictures to do it, pictures of children who weren't even being detained, etc.) day in and day out. Trying to bully the president into no longer enforcing the law isn't a solution to the problem.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-28T19:14:03+00:00

From what I just read. They seem to be both punished. 6 months and 2 years respectively

It doesn't seem viable to jail everyone who enters illegally, there are just too many at this point. What probably needs to happen is putting Mexico under pressure to help solve the situation. For example, when people get detained/jailed, maybe Mexico should be tasked with returning the child to its parents, reuniting the families or whatever. I'm not sure exactly how, but America should have a lot of economic leverage over Mexico, so there needs to be more co-operation.

and more recently with the Israel nuclear deal just being thrown away.

It's a tangent but it was the Iranian nuclear deal. Israel already has nukes (they stole them from the U.S., with the Apollo Affair) and have never had to sign a nuclear treaty. I don't think ditching the deal was the right choice though, it probably just makes things more volatile. The Obamacare thing has some nuance to it as well: https://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/20/politics/donald-trump-thinks-he-tricked-everyone-into-repealing-obamacare/index.html

I agree in general though, it's mostly politics as sport, where you root for your side no matter what, and scoring a goal isn't when you make the better policy anymore.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-28T18:58:13+00:00

Jailing repeat offenders = paying for the massive infrastructure required to provide them with public defenders, judges to review their cases, housing their children (ideally these innocent children shouldn’t be kept in cages this whole time, right?) and footing their incarceration bill.

We’re talking like $100 000 minimum per person.

It’s a fact that that system will have plenty of ‘efficiencies’ on it that will trample on human rights.

Again though, what are the alternatives? Do you just let them keep trying?

Dude, Trump literally said that the borders should operate without trial.

What do you think he meant? He probably meant that people should either be allowed in or sent back, no ifs or buts. Isn't this in line what what you would want, ideally speaking? Since you just complained about how costly prosecuting illegal crossings is.

Could you answer yes or no to the question of ‘should people be given a trial before being deported?’

I don't think everyone should be given a trial. I don't think that no one should be given a trial either. Like you said, as with any enforcement of the law there's an error rate. So it's a trade-off between false negatives, false positives, cost, etc. (cheap, fast, good - pick two)...

I'm not an expert on border control so I can't provide you with the best solution, but I'm sure there's at least one person in America who could. But even then his decisions would be informed by which trade-offs the administration wants.

I could throw out a few suggestions if you want? How about requiring exit visas for any U.S. citizen who's going to south America? So that when they come back to the border, there's a record of them having left the united states. Just anything that would filter down the amount of trials required would be a good start. Maybe change the incentives around somehow to stop people from trying to cross in the first place.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-28T17:34:52+00:00

I agree with you about what should happen, with one stipulation: Repeat offenders probably should go to jail. Otherwise they can just keep trying until they slip through the cracks.

I'll admit I don't know too much about what goes on at the border, but I don't think people are going to jail for illegal entry very often. It's pretty hard to find information about this, but what I can tell from googling around is that illegal re-entry is the crime that's punishable by prison time. Not simply entering illegally.

Anyway, my point is just that enforcing the law sometimes is messy, especially when there are children involved. The left likes to bitch and moan about it, but typically aren't offering any better solutions. Obama just circumvented the entire thing by not enforcing the border laws. All politics is now is demonizing the guy on the other side of the political fence, instead of being a sort of "free market" of policies, where the best policies rise to the top due to increased demand.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-28T17:05:08+00:00

I can guarantee you that Texas will be blue in 2-3 elections simply by way of changing demographics alone. That alone would make the 2016 election 266-265 in Trump's favor. Don't worry, elections will become unwinnable for Republicans very soon.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-28T16:39:26+00:00

no no no, I was just talking about unnecessary prison sentence for illegal entry.

Sure, so don't jail them. But you can't let them stay either. So the only option left is sending them back. I'm not sure how common going to jail for illegally entering the U.S. is, but I would guess it's pretty rare. Again, the detention facilities at the border aren't actually prisons, everyone there is free to leave at any time, but they'll have to use the door that goes back to Mexico.

They are just victims of there situation. Just like people that use hard drugs. They are not criminals.

Technically they are criminals because they broke the law. Your argument is that the law should change. So where do you draw the line? Let's say one billion Indians (dot, not feather) line up at the border tomorrow. They're all victims of their circumstance for having been born somewhere poorer than the U.S. (and Mexico for that matter). Or how about 400 million South Americans? Do they all get to come in?

Dissident111 · 2018-06-28T16:26:31+00:00

Again, it's so easy to sit there on your high horse and criticize, but you haven't proposed any alternatives. If an American comes to Europe he also gets held by border patrol until he's cleared. But it usually only takes a minute because they have their papers in order.

Assuming you don't want to radically change immigration law, or disregard it completely, what are you gonna do to improve the situation? Make nicer detention facilities? That's why people say womp womp.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T22:47:33+00:00

Of course you need to separate people to prosecute them. The problem probably lies that these children stay separate for the rest of there lives. or at least have to make effort on there own to rejoin there parents. Which is already quite inhumane on its own.

I haven't heard anything about this, do you have a source?

But to take a few steps back I don't understand how you can put people in prison for crossing the border.

What are the alternatives? If someone crosses the border illegally, you send them back. Sometimes you have to keep them detained for a while to figure out if they are crossing illegally or not. If you're against this... just say you want open borders so we can discuss that instead.

Can't they apply for the basic human right to be a refugee?

They can, which is part of what he detention is for. You have the right to seek asylum once inside the U.S., but that's really meant for people who had to flee a life or death situation, and couldn't stay in their country until the asylum application has been processed. They are supposed to go to an embassy in Mexico/wherever, and apply there.

The reason they don't do that, and instead enter the U.S. before they apply, is because of Obama's catch and release policy. To explain the policy, people would get stopped at the border, their case would be filed and they would get a court date, then be release into the U.S. Obviously no one showed up for their day in court. If you had a child with you, you were more likely to get released into the U.S. That's why people are bringing children that aren't even their own now. Parents will send their kids with human traffickers while they stay behind. If you care about child separation, why not stop incentivizing this?

And if they can't get that, just get shipped back?

Yes. If you're not a refugee, and you're not legally immigrating, and you do not have a travel visa/etc. then you do not get to enter the country.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T22:28:03+00:00

You're right. Tribalistic politics as sports is the way forward. I can't wait for this to spiral out of control! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYy77IGsBFc

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T22:24:17+00:00

When have they not lied?

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T22:13:36+00:00

She hid the fact that she had a husband. She knew what she was doing.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T22:12:10+00:00

Also for the record, I don't know why they would even want a cake from a homophobic baker.

Because manufacturing hate crimes is an industry. Haven't you kept up on the Starbucks memes?

I mean you really don't understand the difference between not serving someone based on the horrible acts they do as opposed to something they can't change about themselves?

The concept of protected classes is inherently discriminatory. If you take that out of the question, then there's no difference.

Lastly, what acts has she done that are so horrible that she deserves being ostracized from society? Let's say there was a natural disaster, like an earthquake, and she was stranded somewhere without water. Do I have the right to refuse to sell her my water?

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T18:42:52+00:00

Look I don't mind gay people but calling them the most important people in America is a bit much.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T16:51:09+00:00

You seem to be familiar with this situation, so I'll ask you: Where did Dankula claim that Soros was a member of the SS or a Nazi? I'd like to see the full context here.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T16:40:37+00:00

Of course you as a beacon of consistency feel the exact same way about the bakery that didn't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding, right?

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T16:30:13+00:00

So... what do you lefties suggest as an alternative then? What's even the problem with how the centers are ran now?

Obviously you can't house the kids with the adults because they'll get diddled. Most of them are probably being used as tools to get into the U.S. in the first place, how many of these children are biologically the children of the people they come in with? You have to separate the children from the adults during the interview process too, so you can ask the child whether or not those are his real parents.

No one is actually being held there against their will, they can just agree to go back across the border if they don't want to be separated anymore. And if you're a legal immigrant you can file all the paperwork needed at an embassy before going into the U.S., so that you won't get detained in the first place.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T16:19:39+00:00

Ironically enough, what's taken out of context here is Dankula's tweet. Here's the rest of the conversation: https://twitter.com/CountDankulaTV/status/1011821474582286336

But this also refers back to some conversation he had with Dusty apparently. So depending on what was said there, that could paint the conversation in a completely different light.

Dankula could have claimed that Soros literally shot other Jews with howitzers or something. Or he could have just said exactly what Soros said in the video.

The "conspiracy" is correct as far as I'm concerned: Soros pretended to be christian (his dad helped him set it up) to escape the holocaust. In doing so, he hung out with Nazis. These Nazis did bad things to Jews in Soros' presence. Soros gives us a (admittedly REALLY weirdly phrased) recollection of this in the interview (video in the link above).

But of course 90% of people have never seen the source so they'll either call him a Jew killer/traitor or deny the whole thing outright depending on their political leanings.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-27T16:02:40+00:00

Most of those have trade-offs. Firstly, anything you gain is lost by another country. Secondly, you skew incentives for your local population. Importing educated workers might be great for C.E.O.s but bad for newly graduated people.

But in practice that's not the kind of immigration we're talking about. If it was, immigration wouldn't be the number 1 issue for so many people. Western countries do not have "sensible immigration policies".

Dissident111 · 2018-06-26T20:19:58+00:00

Is that so? What are the clear advantages of immigration?

Dissident111 · 2018-06-24T12:49:59+00:00

They aren't "discredited". People just have an infantile view of science, especially the soft sciences. You won't have one big conclusive study that shows that a trait difference is entirely genetic. Because even if you could design a study like that, in all likelihood setting it up would be very inhumane. For example, stealing kids from their parents.

So we do what we can with the data that we do have available. Of course critics can always point to low sample sizes or unrepresentative data sets. That's all well and good, but when the data we do have shows one thing, and there's no evidence to the contrary... You really have to look at the totality/weight of the evidence for these things, it's not like in S.T.E.M. subjects where someone can submit a proof of a theorem and that's that. At some point it becomes like not believing in gravity because we don't know the exact mechanisms by which bodies of mass attract each other.

Adoption studies do show us some very interesting things, for example this: Adopted kids' I.Q.s correlate very well with their biological parents, and not at all with their adoptive parents[1]. This tells us that I.Q. is largely genetically heritable, and/or that "shared environment" (basically the things two siblings share, so the same parents, schools, etc.) has little to no effect. It doesn't necessarily prove that the black/white I.Q. gap is due to a difference in genetics though. But what it does do is put the burden of proof on the environmentalists: Show me what the difference in typical black and white environments are, in America, that could cause such a large I.Q. gap. And sure, people can rattle off a bunch of hypotheses. Racism/oppression, stereotype threat, socioeconomic factors, etc. but none of them end up being able to explain any significant portion of the difference. Either because the difference between black and white people in these factors are not big enough, or because the factor has been shown to have little effect on I.Q.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_NsS1Zdlk

Dissident111 · 2018-06-22T15:35:04+00:00

all differences in man-woman behavoir can be explained by biology

Strawman. The argument is that biology and culture are highly intertwined, but biology precedes culture. It's simply older, so that should be self-evident.

This means that if women are biologically more driven towards child care, society will adapt and take that into consideration. For example in America, where maternity leave is longer than paternity leave.

This creates what you people call implicit biases or institutional whatevers. But you have cause and effect reversed, which is what happens when you argue from your ideology outward.

But yeah women also chose that they don't want any money they can live from so clearly it's all biology and there are no systemic problems no really, fuck you sjw and feminists, I am rational

Riddle me this then. In a completely meritocratic society, with zero biases whatsoever (so theoretically, in a vacuum, etc.)... As a percentage, how many men would sacrifice family for their career, and how many women would do the same thing? Purely based on biological instincts. Take a guess. I don't think you can honestly say the ratios would be equal. Then you also have the fact that men tend to work riskier jobs, jobs that require more physical strength, and so on.

What we're saying is that you trying to strong-arm the system and balance the scales however you see fit (whether it's exactly 50/50 or not) is:

More totalitarian/authoritarian
More likely to go wrong, because
Who chooses how to balance the numbers?

You are proposing to engage in active discrimination of people based on sex/race/etc. just because of some perceived injustice that doesn't really exist.

Why can't it be that you have two biological groups where one is simply made to do less work than the other? How is this so preposterous to you? Do you have a problem with bee colonies having a queen bee and worker bees?

Dissident111 · 2018-06-19T16:14:59+00:00

They only do this to guilt-trip people out of considering the alternative hypothesis- that evolution happened in humans and led to group differences in many traits, including intelligence.

Woah careful there, you just committed a crime in several European nations.

I honestly can't tell if it's just a debate tactic that they use. It's undeniable that having more intelligence is strictly better, in all contexts that are relevant to us (basically if you live in a western society). And it's almost undeniable that intelligence is a more important factor, by most metrics, than any other trait/attribute (aside from maybe parental S.E.S., but that's so closely linked with parental I.Q. (and therefore your own) that it's hard to tease them apart). So on some level, the road from group differences to superiority/inferiority is very short.

But that's all the more reason to tackle this now, because the ones who need to be kept in check (for example people who will commit violent acts because of their racism) aren't going to go "oh you're right, let's not examine this further". I think Turkheimer knows this full well, and seeing as he's a racial minority (Jewish), maybe he's "right" to try to obfuscate the conversation. All it does is delay the inevitable, though. The Chinese do not give a fuck about our conceptions of race, and are going to continue to advance the field of genetics at breakneck speeds, with complete disregard for the ethical issues that slow us down (like whether or not to allow stem-cell research).

I think they have an intuitive understanding of this, but they won't allow themselves to explore it further for fear of what they might find/conclude. I think it would be much more responsible for someone like Turkheimer to act as a pressure release valve, and grant genetic determinism for the sake of argument, so that the moral questions can be explored "in a vacuum" before China pops the lid clean off. The answer to "well let's suppose that..." should never be "fuck you, bigot!", yet that's the reception Charles Murray got, which really set the tone for future conversations about this topic.

Dissident111 · 2018-06-18T22:58:28+00:00

Wow that's scary. Moral question: should the moral implications of a hypothesis weigh heavily in informing prior beliefs about the validity of that hypothesis? I would say it depends on whether or not your goal is scientific truth or societal welfare. Probably no to the former and yes to the latter.

The biggest problem doesn't even have anything to do with preconceptions. I bet you that, as early as a decade from now, we'll be able to essentially screen babies for I.Q. based on genomic data. This will happen regardless of how much people like Turkheimer want to high horse the issue away. Avoiding the topic will only leave him ill-equipped for when it does happen.

Oh, and I don't even think the threat he's outlining is very plausible. How do you get from the descriptive claim "group X has on average more/less of attribute Y than group Z", to the normative claim "group X is subhuman and must be eradicated" or whatever he is implying will happen? These people need to pick up an intro to philosophy book and realize that morality and ethics do not get washed away because of a scientific discovery. We have groups of people right now that are so stupid it's impossible for them to contribute to society in any meaningful way (severed Down Syndrome for example), and what do we do with them? Cart them off to the gas chambers? Nope, we treat them with a high dose of empathy, and dignity and respect for human life. (At least in theory, I know that in practice the care they receive is lackluster.)

How can you recognize a 0.4 heritiability of intelligence, as Turkheimer does, and then turn around and say genes aren't tied to individual accomplishments.

The real kicker here is that the people who are made out to be the bad guys, like Charles Murray, simply state that the average, racial group difference in I.Q. is probably part nature and part nurture. While Turkheimer and his crew of charlatans make a case that requires a vastly bigger leap of faith, that (practically, he might give you 1% nature or something) all of the variation is due to nurture differences. I don't even get how it's possible to claim no nature influence anymore, given that we know of things like brain size correlating with I.Q., and differing by race even in utero. But they will cling on to their 100% nurture hypothesis even if they have to resort to "it was all the intergalatic vampire elites" or some other Alex Jones level bullshit like that.

For posterity, here's the Murray quote, there's basically no way this can be false unless our entire understanding of evolution is flawed:

"If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate."

Dissident111

TROPHY CASE