Half-baked Republican Presidential Fruitcakes (and fellow confections)

mikhail wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRIr9MNmCwU
Just look at the abortion debate. Pro-choice (so the other guys are against choice, and therefore evil) vs Pro-life (so the other guys are against life, and therefore evil). I increasingly find that whatever my positon on political subjects, the most vocal people on both sides are loathsome.

Pro choice is a proper name for the position of believing women should have a right to choose. Pro choice people are not necessarily pro abortion. They might never choose to have one themselves, but they recognise that they have no right to force their own religious or moral opinion on others.
Anti abortion people are anti choice when it comes to abortion.

Pro life is actually a sophistic manipulation of the debate, they should be called anti abortion because that is what they ate. They chose the label because it implies that the other side of the debate are anti life, or pro death.

Akrasia wrote: »

Pro choice is a proper name for the position of believing women should have a right to choose. Pro choice people are not necessarily pro abortion. They might never choose to have one themselves, but they recognise that they have no right to force their own religious or moral opinion on others. Anti abortion people are anti choice when it comes to abortion.

It's not a proper name for the position of believing women should have a right to kill other people though. Claiming that one is a properly accurate term for a position whilst the other is not is really just investing in either sides rhetoric whilst refusing to acknowledge that the term each side chooses to describe itself stems from the fundamental basis of it's argument. It's patently obvious that they are not two opposite sides of the same argument; the basic premise of either sides position is a different point to the basic premise of the other side. Trying to frame the oppositions position from your own premise is a tactical move, not an honest assessment.

Akrasia wrote: »

Pro life is actually a sophistic manipulation of the debate, they should be called anti abortion because that is what they ate. They chose the label because it implies that the other side of the debate are anti life, or pro death.

Pro choice is no less a sophistic manipulation of the debate though. It denies that the debate is about the lives of people and attempts to redirect the debate by implying that what is being the discussed is the denial of a choice to a person, when (from a truly honest pro life point of view) it obviously is not.

Pro Choice should be called pro choice because that is their chosen position, just as Pro Life should be called pro life because that is their chosen position. Trying to say otherwise isn't trying to engage with the discussion, it's trying to manipulate the discussion.

FA Hayek wrote: »

Porous borders are certainly an issue and certainly not a different problem when in one year 7 million people can enter illegally.

Nitpick: It's not 7 million in one year; it's estimated 5.5 - 7 million in total who are still in the country, having entered without inspection in any year.

The source you link to suggests 700K - 800k new unauthorised migrants annually, of whom about half arrive without inspection (and the other half are inspected, but overstay).

The source also suggests 179 million nonimmigrant admissions every year. So that would suggest, of each year's nonimmigrant admissions, about 0.4% turn into undocumented overstayers (and that includes those who cross the border without inspection).

That strikes me as a pretty low rate, TBH. It's at the kind of level where you could spend an awful lot of money trying to get it even lower, and not get much return for your efforts.

recedite wrote: »

Nitpick: Its 12 million

Good point. [Peregrinus slaps head.] Nevertheless my main point holds good; it's not true to say that "in one year 7 million people can enter illegally". The figure is more like one-tenth of that.

recedite wrote: »

Not quite, because most of them are daily commuters, and it includes Canada as well as Mexico. So lets say, in one year a Canadian commuter working a 5-day week crosses the border 600 times, a Mexican commuter does the same, and a Columbian drugs smuggler makes one trip with $3M worth of cocaine, and then retires to live in Miami as an illegal.
What % of the three individuals turned into undocumented overstayers again?
And that's not even counting the Europeans etc. who flew in and out.

Well, on a nitpick, a Colombian drugs smuggler who is retiring is unlikely to retire illegally in Miami. He'll retire in Colombia, or he'll retire legally in Miami.

And, on another nitpick, a Canadian resident who commutes daily to the US for work will enter the country about 300 times a year, not 600 times (unless he goes home for lunch every day).

But your main point is good. Do we know how many individuals enter the US each year as nonimmigrants, after adjusting the raw figures for individuals who make multiple entries? I haven't seen any figures on this.

Of course, we'd have to make this adjustment on both sides of the equation. Migrants who enter the country by evading border inspection probably don't cross the border multiple times, but migrants who arrive on non-immigrant visas or border crossing cards may well do so.

The report to which FA Hayek links suggest that 1.3% of nonimmigrant arrivals result in overstays (though it does talk at some length about the difficulty of making such an estimate). While 1.3% may in absolute terms be quite a large number of people, it does suggest that consular, port and airport controls are good enough to secure a 98.7% compliance rate, which when you're dealing with human behaviour is pretty high. Which goes back to my main point; further improving that is going to be extremely difficult. You'll really have to throw resources at it to acheive even marginal improvements, and you'd have to think about whether their might be more effective ways to spend those resources to tackle your problem.

I think this highlights a contradiction at the heart of Trump's platform. Trump's appeal is to the middle classes (in US terms) who have been largely by-passed by increased wealth in the past thirty years. They're the ones whose jobs have been eliminated, whose real wages have been eroded, while others reap the benefits of globalisation. But if what you want to do is improve life on Main Street; improve real wages; improve job opportunities for people who don't have law degrees or IT qualifications, and if your strategy for that is to prevent outsourcing of jobs and outsources of production to places like, well, Mexico, the more you succeed in that the more you increase the incentive for Mexican workers to migrate to the US. (US wages get better; Mexican wages get sh!ttier. What would you do if you were a Mexican?) And, as everyone in public policy knows, don't increase incentives and then expect people not to respond to them. And my guess would be that the effect of the increased incentives, if Trump does succeed in improving the life of middle-class Americans, will more than offset any tougher border controls that he may be thinking of.

This isn't an easy conundrum to solve. But I don't think Trump has even spotted the problem, which suggests that his prospects of solving it are fairly dismal.

recedite wrote: »

Within the next year or so, I fully expect the Trump-haters to start calling him out for not building "The Wall" of their nightmares. C'est la vie :pac:

God forbid a politician get called out on ditching an election promise as soon as the vote is won.

Sure I don't want the wall built but him not building the wall will be an admission from the man himself that the left was right and the wall was a completely stupid idea.

He has been oddly specific about the details if it was a metaphor http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/jul/26/how-trump-plans-build-wall-along-us-mexico-border/

recedite wrote: »

Its a good article.

It's a good reply???

I'll paraphrase what I said in the "President Trump" thread in AH, the ties between Bannon and Trump remind me of how Putin panders to ultra-nationalists to gloss over Russia's faltering economy.

robindch wrote: »

I think it's a mistake to assume that DT had any fixed platform at all. On the contrary, on the campaign trail, he gave the continual impression that he was simply saying the first thing which came into his head and no more expected to be picked up on any of them than a tipsy bluffer at a poker tournament.

This. And I think his supporters understand this very well.

Trump supporters don’t support him because they actually expect him to deliver on the detail of his slate of preposterous, unconstitutional and contradictory promises. They know very well he won’t.

What they like about the promises is not that they think they are true in the sense that Trump will deliver them. They think they’re true in the sense that they give you a genuine insight into the kind of man Trump is - the way he thinks, what he feels, the values he holds. This makes him appear genuine and authentic in the way that Hillary - or any “establishment” politician who calculates every utterance by reference to what is expected and what will appeal to voters and donors - is not.

But this still leaves Trump with a problem. He’s very unpredictable, but in so far as we can predict him, the policies and attitudes which he seems likely to pursue don’t seem likely to deliver the outcomes that his supporters will want or expect. Trump proposes to increase the incentives to migrate illegally by lifting wages and job conditions at the lower end of the labour market and, if he thinks he can counter that with tougher border measures, he’s dreaming. Trump’s rhetoric notwithstanding, US border measures are already pretty tough and pretty effective, and it’s going to be hard to deliver much improvement on them.

And his rhetoric has is being scaled back to a point where his new border measures are actually not that much tougher. Initially he promised to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants (which would basically be all of them). That’s now scaled back to between 2 and 3 million, focussing on undocumented immigrants who are criminals. It will not be easy for him to reach this target; there are only 180,000 undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of crimes still in the US (and they’re mostly still there because they are serving sentences). But, still. If he does get up to the lower end of this range, all he will be doing is continuing the efforts of the Obama administration, which has deported 2 million illegal immigrants.

So, basically, it begins to look as though Trump will make illegal immigration more attractive and he will try to counter this incentive by what amounts to tough talk about border security, with little projected difference in outcomes. I can’t see that working out well as a way of delivering on the expectations of his supporters. The US electorate may be about to learn that voting for someone because you understand how he thinks and you like it is not a good idea; you really have to have some notion of what he’s going to do, and you have to like that too.