Not Falling for Specious Arguments

How should we logically and ethically weigh an extremely clever, specious argument from an economics expert, even if like myself, we have no formal training in economics? To wit: Noah Smith's argument that recent migrants do not lower wages, meaning the wages of natives. Below are quotes from Smith's argument. I left out most of Smith's irrelevancies, circular claims, and other fallacies for copyright reasons. Some of my comments are in parentheses because I can't do brackets on my phone.

"No one is going to be persuaded by this post (persuasion is irrelevant)." Polls suggest significant variation in immigration views from year to year.

"First, people don’t really believe social science evidence. It took years and years of empirical research — solid results, almost all pointing in the same direction — just to shift academic economists’ opinions on the effects of minimum wage (irrelevant to immigration)." Most social science studies aren't evidence, especially pro-multiculturalist studies. Surprisingly, Smith portrays economists as having closed minds while also treating them as the top experts on immigration issues. The views of Marxian, libertarian, and neoliberal economists all massively contradict each other, and more important, massively contradict reality. Economists in some European countries, where most migrants receive welfare or engage in free riding occupations, preposterously tell pollsters that migrants are not lowering wages of natives.

"The average person, not being an academic economist, has even less of an idea of how reliable social science research is (false claim)."

"Second, in my experience (small sample), anti-immigration people (irrelevant ad hominem) are completely set in their belief that immigration should be restricted (false claim). It’s their fixed north star (false analogy). The justifications change — Lower wages! Environmental destruction! Brain drain! Rule of law! Cultural change! (straw person, good reasons are additive and there are far more) — but the policy conclusion never wavers (false claim).

"So this post isn’t going to persuade anti-immigration people (irrelevant ad hominem) to change their stance, and it’s probably not going to persuade (irrelevant) many normies (irrelevant ad hominem) to be up in arms about the need to let in more immigrants, either. But it’s still important to write (false claim), and not just because I’m a stubborn S.O.B. who will die face-down in the muck fighting for The Empirical Evidence (false claim). It’s because in another 20 years or so, when America’s current freakout (straw person) over identity and nationhood has passed, we’re hopefully going to be ready to let in a bunch of immigrants again."

"Most people think of labor markets as determined by supply and demand (straw person). This is actually not a great model of the labor market in general (straw person, it is better than alternatives offered)."

"A positive labor supply shock pushes wages down. A positive labor demand shock pushes up wages. Maybe one of those effects is a little bigger; maybe the other. But they’re going to mostly cancel out (false claim)."

"And to see why this is true, just think about babies. Each new generation is bigger than the one that came before it. If those young people were just a labor supply increase, then as population went up, wages would go down. But obviously that’s not what happens, because young people also buy stuff, which pushes up labor demand, which pushes wages back up (false analogy and missing quantification)."

"Immigrants are just babies from elsewhere (false analogy)."

"As you might expect, economists have done quite a lot of research on the question of whether immigration lowers wages. It’s not the kind of thing where you can just wave your hands and... conclude that the former causes the latter... just a few reasons you can’t just look at overall correlations: Immigrants may compete with some groups of native-born workers more than others; for example, less-educated immigrants might compete mainly with native-born workers without a high school degree (no good reason to use the word may here)."

"Second, they try to compare places that get immigrants with places that don’t, but which are otherwise similar in all economic respects (false claim)." This is why all the pro migration studies are junk. Economists ignore dozens of long-term indirect factors, factors they consider offensive, and so on. They ignore IQ, faulty measures, unrepresentative sampling, character traits, economic effects of cultural changes, the low productivity of some migrant groups far more numerous descendants, and so on. Those groups' descendants then get counted as part of the native population in future junk science. It is extremely important to know whether the descendants of migrants will cause genocides, subjugation, totalitarianism, civil wars, societal collapse or massive amounts of legalized corruption. The historical track record of diversity is atrocious.

Smith does not stick to the wage issue. He raises the irrelevant issue of whether contemporary migration is good in general, treating the wage issue as if it decides the immigration issue, leaving out other  important issues, especially issues more important than the wage issue. Smith lists the junk science, some of it relevant to unemployment but not the wage issue. 

Smith never mentions productivity.

If an immigrant group, and far more important, their much less productive descendants, are less productive than the native population but disproportionately get hiring quotas, receive welfare benefits, and enter into multitudes of other free riding activities, they will almost certainly lower the median and mean hourly compensations of native populations, along with living standards. It's important to know the rates of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, evolutionary egoism, psychological egoism, unethical egoism, and other traits among differing ethnoracial groups, but that would be too offensive to know or mention. Immigration also turns native populations into worse and less productive people than they would otherwise be. Many immigrant groups become far worse as their power and numbers increase. A decades-old study tells us little about how ethnoracial groups will behave 50 years from now when they have more power.

There is also an ever decreasing quality in the character of ethnoracial groups entering the US, but they are all just lumped together as immigrants by Smith.

To weigh arguments, we should give no weight to fallacies and compare the relevant good points from various sides. Unfortunately, for Smith's argument, it contains no good points and thus no evidence despite his claims to the contrary. It matters little whether he has a dozen or 50 dozen evidence-free junk science studies to cite. We should not fall for rhetorical tricks no matter how clever. The long-term consequences for present societies' rampant glib, craven, and anti-reason views on dysgenic and multicultural issues will be disastrous for hundreds of future generations.

An Extremely Brief Guide to Current American Political Parties

Democratic Party: plutocratic globalism, multiculturalism, totalitarianism, and super neoconservatism. Democrats took the lead in neoconservatism by trying to start a super war over Russiagate exaggerations. Liberal interventionism and liberal democracy are merely euphemisms for neoconservatism.

Republican Party: super plutocratic globalism, multiculturalism, totalitarianism, and neoconservatism. Civic nationalism and American nationalism (Amnat) are also euphemisms for neoconservatism.

Libertarian Party: super plutocratic globalism, multiculturalism, totalitarianism, and stealth neoconservatism. Those who tolerate or support legalized bribery and control of the mass media by neoconservatives are stealth neoconservatives, no matter how they claim to oppose neoconservative militarism in their periodicals. Policies matter more than platitudes.

Green Party: multiculturalism, stealth communism.

Constitution Party: Republican party with more Yahweh and Tea Party stuff, including the elimination of social security.

Justice Party: more willing to reform plutocratic economics than the Greens but also has tendencies towards communism.

Reform Party: Yes, the party that Ross Perot made famous still exists. For specifics, the party insists it plans to "stop illegal immigration" and "get us out of NAFTA, GATT, CAFTA and the WTO now." Plus a balanced budget scheme, causing nightmarish austerity during depressions and recessions. Also some plans to fight corruption.

American Freedom Party: hard to tell. Could be a bait-and-switch party supporting Hitlerism. But at least their platform is semi-decent, albeit vague. It does claim to support self-determination universalism. Party members supported Trump in 2016, massively contradicting their platform.

National Justice Party: a few weeks old. Too soon to tell but does not look promising.

How evil are the establishment parties? They have been working to incite an anti-white civil war for the past several months, to distract the populace from establishment evils--classic divide-and-screw behavior. They expect unemployed gig workers, the formerly self-employed, recent graduates, part time workers, and millions of others ineligible for unemployment compensation to live until the corona crises ends on the $1,200 they received months ago.

Do Not Take Medical Advice from Charles Murray

In a recent tweet, Charles Murray wrote, "the rational way to choose a physician is to take the East Asian or South Asian first, or a person with a Jewish last name. Not racist, but a matter of correctly playing the odds of getting competent care." Likely because those groups score higher than whites on IQ tests, with Jews leading the way, having IQs roughly 11 points higher than whites, assuming Murray means Brahmin Caste for South Asian.

But physicians are not randomly selected from populations.

Except for blacks and other affirmative action cases, they come from narrow, homogenous IQ sub-groups--smart people. We should not assume Jewish doctors are much smarter than white doctors. The mean IQs of Jewish and white physicians should be nearly identical because the white population is at least 25 times larger than the Jewish population despite Jews having a roughly 11 point larger mean IQ on tests.

The mean GPA of 2015-2016 medical school applicants labeled white is 3.73, that of applicants labeled Asian: 3.73. (The stats likely count people of North African and Southwest Asian descent as white. The stats do not separate Northeast Asians, Brahmin Caste Indians, and other Asians.)

That's not counting rampant cheating done by non-whites. In Asia, students riot and launch lawsuits if they are not permitted to cheat, on the grounds that it is an unfair disadvantage to not be permitted to cheat when their co-ethnics cheat. They cheat in classrooms, and they hire allies to take standardized tests for them.

But medical competence is more than IQ. Whites are higher in compassion, including for other whites, while nonwhites often regard whites as merely a means to their own ends. Whites are also more able to face facts that conflict with self-interest, more able to experience guilt for mistakes and correct those mistakes. See Peter Frost's blog for research on character traits.

For decades, Brahmin orthopedic surgeons more eagerly recommended articular cartilage shaving surgeries to patients, though the surgeries made knees worse because they cared more about making money than facing facts. They did not care when patients complained their knees were worse than before surgeries. They continue to prescribe fish oil despite well-reasoned research contradicting fish oil for cardiovascular health. There are powerful genetic and environmental reasons why India has had a vicious caste system for thousands of years.

In the absence of other specific evidence, choose white doctors first, Northeast Asians second, other non-black doctors third, and black doctors last.

(By the way, Murray's Libertarian economic ideas are even more poorly reasoned.)

The establishments wanted to watch parts of America burn

In the days after the death of George Floyd, there was a palpable realization that it was just a matter of time before the mass domestic terrorism started. We live in a bizarro land where riots are seen as both predictable and unstoppable.

No political leader that I know of instituted a preemptive curfew and made clear that any outdoor political gathering of two or more individuals would be subject to immediate arrest. Hell, politicians could have claimed arrests were part of Corona prevention.

Any competent public school teacher will note they must be a hard-ass the first several days of school or things fall apart.

Democrats wanted to send a message of look what Trump's divisiveness has caused, then when damage escalated, they shifted to placing nearly all the blame on "White antifa," the same establishment that spent the past four years cheering on antifa. Now they cite evidence free rumors of "white supremacist" provocateurs. As JP Rushton and Judith Rich Harris both pointed out, blacks are genetically and environmentally predisposed toward dominance seeking, despite their poor IQs and characters, making it unlikely they would follow a tiny percentage of white provocateurs.

So even on a weekend when nearly all terrorism is being committed by people of color and-or communism, the establishment media are trying to blame people they slur and distort as "white supremacists." And the multicultural faith-based believers believe what their mass media tell them to believe.

Trump wants to sweep in and pretend to be the law and order president despite spending over three years talking tough, promoting white collar crime, and stabbing his voter base in the back.

No matter which political party gains an advantage from the riots, we people lose.

Pathogen Preparations: Another Failure of Fake Meritocracy

In the past, I read a few PDFs on pathogen preparedness, policy recommendations written by establishment groups. I don't remember much about the PDFs or who wrote them. What I do remember: the PDFs were filled with the vapid generalities groups driven by groupthink and opportunism write.

For specifics, the PDFs had many so-and-so will be in charge of such-and-such claims. B should take orders from A. X should get training from Y. The type of thinking befitting a nation dominated by oligarchal neoconservatism. Some organizational stuff is helpful, but far more was required.

To be fair, obscure websites likely had better prescriptions that I, or most others, never found.

Nowhere did I read: We must stockpile thousands of ventilators. We must stockpile billions of PPE supplies, then rotate the stock. We should domestically produce far more nurses and physicians. We must take on the forces keeping supplies low. We must require the government to buy nearly all its supplies from domestic manufacturers to keep domestic suppliers viable. We must eviscerate the power of finance, health insurers, and other parasitic oligopolies. We must improve BSL safety.

Those would have been bridges too far or too painful for elites--Operation Cronyistic Market Failure.

Three More Simple Reasoning Hacks

1. Fallacious premises fail to support conclusions. Fallacious premise recognition is a rotten reason to auto reject a conclusion. We have a duty to weigh the good points of an argument against the good points of other arguments on an issue. Arguments with many fallacies sometimes outweigh arguments with fewer fallacies because the former sometimes have good points worth more weight than the other arguments' good points. 
2. The word not is sometimes a warning that a claim is a straw person attack, especially the phrase not all. The words perfect, panacea, and guarantee are similar warnings. Examples: "There's no guarantee that the policy will work. Not all Lutherans support that."
3. Criticizing the preposterous political belief of a stranger having almost no political power, even when quoted exactly and in the correct context, is a straw person attack. Our duty is to find important truths, not to entertain ourselves attacking easy targets or to attempt to fanatically defend poorly reasoned beliefs by comparing ourselves to worse individuals.

Screen Time Versus Paper Time: No Good Way Out for Now

Much research criticizes the amount of time humans spend staring at screens. Staring at screens for long hours, researchers suggest, has harmful effects independent of harmful words and images contained therein.

But contemporary paper materials stink. Ethically wise individuals must spend several hours searching to find one book ethically worth reading. They have to open dozens of newspapers to find one article ethically worth reading. Academic journals are written in poorly reasoned academese by authors more interested in career promotion than important truths.

Most arguments ethically worth reading are on obscure websites.

Our better current alternatives are to mitigate the damage of screen time by using F.lux or other programs to block blue light. Or reading on an internet equipped Kindles, though Kindles cannot download many websites and fail to replicate the look of paper. Kindles are also fragile. Somewhat ironically, if the deplatforming escalates, we will live in secret societies sharing fact facing paper writings while the masses continue to gorge on television, video games, social media, and other glitzy, hype-riddled mass media garbage.

If an accurate history of the past few hundred years is ever written, the catastrophic practices of  mass media, preoccupied with profits and totalitarian political agendas, will fill many chapters.

Five Simple Hacks to Improve Reasoning

1. Avoid using claims containing the words I or you in arguments for general conclusions. Such claims are often irrelevancies or small sample fallacies. Example: "I'm offended. I don't know anyone who voted for Proposition X." I  and you are often fine in non-arguments and arguments about individual circumstances.
2. Avoid claims starting with the word who, another inadvertent trap for irrelevancies. Example: "Who's to say?"
3. Possibilities are irrelevant. Probabilities and expected values are relevant. The expected value is the probability of an outcome times the value of an outcome. A 64 percent chance of gaining $10,000 has an expected value of $6,400.
4. Hear a media report about a social science study making political or parenting claims, especially causal claims, but know nothing about the study details? Treat the study as junk science until proven otherwise. The study probably failed to control for or tease out genetic causes and/or other causes that contradict the agendas of establishment social scientists. In addition, publication bias, replication failures, and many other flaws make most social science junk science. They have track records of consistently promoting totalitarian activism. They are paid comparative large sums of money to produce lies. Why should the burden be on us to spend thousands of unpaid hours ferreting out their lies?
5. Ignore early studies on rodents or studies of cells unless working in those fields. The probabilities that such studies will lead to something important in humans are tiny.

Kurds, The Letter, and Obama's Quote

I don't support Donald Trump or any existing major political parties. I would support a few minor parties as lesser evils.

But the mass outrage over Trump's Letter to Recep Erdogan, Turkey's ruler, is farcical. Yes, The Letter looks as if it were written by someone with the prose skills of a 14-year-old. The actual ethical content of The Letter is not worse than many other words spoken or written by Trump and other establishment politicians.

Kurds are not our allies. None of the large factions in Africa and Southwest Asia are our allies. Kurdish "refugees" in the West behave poorly, as expected from Southwest Asians devoted to horrible cultures and dysgenic breeding. Peoples with evil dispositions are often victims. That doesn't make them the good guys. There are over 30 million Kurds on the planet. With adequate efforts, they are able to defend themselves much more cost effectively than we can.

Recall Barack Obama's words from Dreams of My Father:

In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

What right lessons? Millions of Japanese migrated to Asia and the Southwest Pacific in the years before Pearl Harbor. Almost none of those migrants sided with the peoples in the places they settled once the Japanese invaded. When a Japanese pilot crash landed on the sparsely populated island of Nihau after the Pearl Harbor attack, the island's three Japanese residents rose up against Hawaiians on behalf of the pilot. The low percentage of sabotage by Japanese in America was due to economic opportunism. Had the Japanese military been superior and invaded, Japanese in America would have behaved as other Japanese did in Asia, Nihau, and the Southwest Pacific. Spare me the patriotic "Japanese-American" propaganda.

A popular email slightly distorted Obama's thoughts to "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." This distortion gave multiculturalists grist to excuse Obama and blast his critics, but the real quote was atrocious.

Not much is ethically uglier than what Arabs and Pakistanis currently believe. Large percentages of Arabs and Pakistanis have told pollsters that infidels, apostates, blasphemers, and accused adulterers should all be murdered. Millions more were likely Machiavellian enough to not admit such beliefs to pollsters.

"Some [estimates suggest] that half the [adult male] Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar [Afghanistan] and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover." Many others likely rape young girls. While I could not find the boy lover stats for Pashtuns in Pakistan, the Pashtun population in Pakistan is nearly 33 million.

Those words by Obama are ethically worse than anything Trump has ever publicly said.