[ExI] Just some thoughts, nothing new really

[John Clark]

On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 12:30 AM Rafal Smigrodzki <
rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:

> *As a libertarian I explicitly renounce the right to dictate to others
> who they should associate with. *
>

OK, but how big can a place be that you could still say any member in it is
"associated" with every other member? Apparently you believe any person in
the USA is "associated" with every other person in that country, and in a
way that's true. The USA is pretty big but it is not the biggest there is.
And Harcore libertarians believe all nation states are artificial
illegitimate divisions anyway and the undisputed largest group of
"associated" people is the entire population of planet Earth. So does any
person on Earth have the right to kill any other person on the Earth if
they don't want to be "associated" with them on the same planet?


> >> Even the libertarian think tank The Cato Institute concluded that
>> illegal immigrants in Texas committed fewer crimes than native born
>> Americans:
>>
>>
>> https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/criminal-immigrants-texas-illegal-immigrant
>>
>
> > *### TL:DR. Don't believe it. Illegal immigrants tend to be less
> intelligent than legal immigrants, and they live in the penumbra of the
> law. Less intelligent people are more likely to commit crimes.*
>

Interesting theory. The history of Science is full of interesting theories
and nearly all of them turned out to be dead wrong.


> *> People living outside the law are more likely to commit crimes and less
> likely to report them.*
>

Less intelligent criminals are more likely to get caught than more
intelligent criminals, so if your theory is correct you'd expect there
would be an excess of Illegal immigrants in prison but, unless you count
illegal immigration itself as a crime, no such excess has been found. Rafal
I'm curious, before June 16 2015 when Trump came down that escalator to
start his campaign for presadent and talked about hordes of foreign rapists
and murders attacking the country did you considered Illegal immigration to
be number one on the list of human existential problems?


> > *I was not born yesterday, I know how a piece of propaganda sounds like*
>

So even the libertarian Cato Institute, well known for its fierce advocacy
of Free Markets, Limited Government and other libertarian ideas, is a
source of fake news and fake statistics. So where can one find the
unvarnished truth? Fox news? Breitbart? Supermarket tabloids? Perhaps one
should just stick with the only information source of known infallibility,
the lips of Donald Trump.

Rafal, just like you I have political and philosophical likes and dislikes,
but unlike you I have no loyalty to ideas and I like the scientific method much
better than anything in politics or philosophy. So in a debate if I realize
my predisposition does not fit the facts and the other guy is arguing from
a logically stronger position than my own I abandon my previous idea and
embrace the new one as my own. If nothing else this tactic certainly makes
it much easier to engage in future debates.

 John K Clark
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