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June 19, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
48:12
Episode 109 - How to Fix the Border “Cages” Situation Using Psychology
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Guess what time it is?
It's the best time of the day.
Which is weird, because some of you will be watching this on replay, and it will be a different time of the day when some of you watch it.
And still, it's the best time of the day.
How do I do it? Well, you can do anything if you've got coffee.
And so, you know what time it is.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams and the simultaneous sip.
Grab your beverage, your vessel, your liquids, and go.
Good simultaneous sipping.
Alright everybody, let's talk about the big topic of the day.
Big topic of the day.
Children in cages ripped from their parents at the borders.
So let me give you the overview.
Starting with what we all agree on.
It's always good to start these types of conversations that are so polarizing.
Start with the parts that everyone agrees on.
Here's what everyone agrees on.
Taking children from their parents is very bad.
It's not as bad as some of the news reports I was seeing yesterday who compared it to taking children away permanently.
So apparently there are studies showing that if you take a child from a parent permanently, and they know that's what's happening at the time, it causes lifelong damage.
Studies show. We don't know what happens if you take somebody away from their parents for a few weeks when everybody knows that they'll get back together.
But it can't be good.
So I think everybody's on the same page, that if there were any practical way to prevent what's happening, Republicans would like it, Democrats would like it, the President would like it, the immigrants themselves would like it.
So we should stop pretending that anyone's on the other side of that.
And perhaps we should talk about this like adults, which is what's not happening in the political world.
But we citizens can talk like adults.
We have that option. The political folks don't have that option because the Democrats have just a great, great campaign issue.
The idea of children in cages is just so awful and powerful that they would be crazy to fix it.
So that's your first problem.
Democrats would be crazy to fix it.
That's how broken our government is.
At the same token, at the same time, Republicans could fix it fairly quickly.
They could just say, hey, change the rule.
Keep those kids with those adults.
Wait a minute, what's missing?
What's missing is how the heck do you do that without making things worse?
If the Republicans had a way, if the President had a way to keep the families together, in that part we do have, of course, we could just not separate them.
But what do you do with them?
Do you make it a really good deal to come here with kids?
Because in the long term, that would make it worse.
So has anybody explicitly on the news in any interview you've seen said what I'm going to say now?
We'd like to fix it in the short term, but nobody has an idea to do that that doesn't make it a more attractive thing, so it's worse in the long term.
Now, maybe there's a plan like that, and for some reason nobody's mentioning it.
The reason that we have this situation is that the last situation didn't work.
So people are asking to go back to the last situation which didn't work because it was causing more people to be incentivized to come because it looked like a pretty good deal.
So, if we were to be adults in the conversation, which are government, and here I'm talking about Republicans, White House, Democrats, there are no adults in this conversation.
Don't kid yourself.
This is a complete failure of government.
A complete failure of government.
Now, at the same time, apparently the professionals working at the border in these shelters, the ICE people, are actually great people doing the best they can with the resources they have.
They're legitimately there to make the world a better place.
The people taking care of the immigrants, they have all the right incentives.
They're kind people doing what they can.
So they're doing what they can.
But there's nobody in the conversation, at least on television or in the press, who is just acting like an adult.
You've got a short-term problem that nobody likes.
Nobody! Stop pretending that somebody likes that.
Nobody likes the current situation.
Nobody! Not the president, not you, not the critics, nobody!
But we also don't like the long-term situation if it makes more of this.
And nobody has an idea for making that go away.
So let's talk about, while our terrible government tries to figure out how to make this go away, let's talk about some things that we could do in the short term to at least make it not as bad.
It's impossible to fix it by waving your hands, but how can you make it less bad?
And I'm going to talk about the psychology of it.
Separate from the physical part of it.
If you were to take away the psychological part of the story, you've taken away the worst part.
Because the psychological part is that children are being taken from parents, and there may be language issues, there may be sophistication issues.
You know, the people coming from deep poverty don't really understand what happens to their kids, May not believe it when somebody says, no, we're going to take care of them.
This is for everybody's well-being.
But do you believe that?
So you've got this psychological trauma.
And so how do you solve the psychological part separate from the physical part?
Because keep in mind that the people who are making this arduous, dangerous, terrible trip all the way to the border...
are people who are in desperate situations.
They're going from a desperate, dangerous, hungry, uncomfortable situation to detention, which is at least safer.
At least that's the intention.
You're separating people to keep it safe.
Separating the men from the women keeps the women safe.
Separate the children from the adults keeps the children safe until you can sort out what's what.
So at least people got physically safer, but psychologically much worse.
And at least they're getting fed probably better than they were.
But still, psychologically, it's horrible.
And at least, you know, things are getting sorted out a little bit.
Maybe they get into the right process eventually.
But psychologically, it's a horror.
So how do you fix the psychological part in the short run so that the parents are not in trauma, the kids are not in trauma, and yet you're doing the right thing?
You're keeping them safe.
Because remember, the separation of the children and the parents, at least by the professionals who are doing the work, is primarily to keep everybody safe.
So let me give you some ideas.
These are just brainstorming kind of ideas.
You can say they're terrible later.
Yeah, I talked about maybe providing iPads so that people could make calls.
But the more I thought about that and saw pictures inside the facilities, I thought, well, where would you put those iPads?
You know, where would they be?
And how do you share them?
And how do you do that? So I've got an improved idea.
Have you seen the telepresence robots?
It's basically, if you can imagine, like a Segway bottom, you know, a little roller bottom that is stable, with just a pole and something that looks like an iPad on the top.
But it's a robot that you can use remotely.
So it can zip around and everything.
Imagine, if you will, that each of the facilities has a robot or two that's just going around all the time and just showing the people showing them getting food showing them taking a nap and that each facility could look in on another facility so for example if you saw the robot come by that said this is the child's facility at x and you know your child is in x Then you could walk over
to the robot and say, oh, hey, can I see the other side?
Can I see the kids in whatever facility?
So there may be some way, and by the way, here's the name of one of the companies.
Looks like one of the leaders or maybe the leader in this space is called double robotics.
It's referred to as an iPad robot.
Now the beauty of the double robotics thing is that the robot would move around.
So I'm dealing with the psychological part.
Imagine you're a parent and you have to only imagine what's happening with your child.
Imagine you don't know where your child is and you're just imagining the facility.
Well, even if that child made a phone call or had an iPad in front of them, you're still seeing just the face of the child or the voice.
If you're a parent, that's not good enough.
You want to see what's happening.
And that's where the robot could come in.
The robot could give you the full 360 eventually.
So that's one idea.
And this, again, we're not talking about a solution because nobody has suggested a solution that doesn't make things worse in the long term.
If somebody comes up with one that makes things better in the short run and the long term, I'm all over that.
So let's not pretend there are two sides.
Everyone is on the same side.
But politically, it's easy to take sides here.
Somebody's talking about privacy.
Well, I don't believe there's a privacy issue that would matter to the people involved.
And if the only people who are looking, and it's not being recorded, are the people who are looking live from one facility to another, as long as the robots don't go in the bathrooms or the showers or whatever, I think you're fine.
Yeah, parents would panic because they don't see their child.
Well, so there would be one way to deal with that, for example, is if you imagine that the kids probably, or I would imagine at some point children line up to give food.
You know, I haven't been there, but I imagine there's some point where people get in line to get food.
At that point, you take the robot and you just go down the line And you look at every face.
And then you turn around and you go back.
So parents would not see their kids maybe the first minute, but they might see their kids eventually, which would be better.
But you're right, there might be an issue of Didn't see the kid on the first pass, so they might feel a little worse.
So maybe the very first time you show it, you do it when the kids are in line for food, so you make sure every kid gets shown at least a couple times a day when they line up for food.
Somebody says, crazy idea, let parents be with their children.
You may have just signed on.
If anybody knew how to do that, mix the adults with the children.
And the hard part is apparently the children are not necessarily, they don't belong to the adults.
Sometimes the children are brought in as a bargaining chip or let's say a get out of jail free card.
They're taking kids for nefarious reasons.
So if we knew That they were real parents, it would be easier to pair them.
But the problem is there's an incentive to bring fake kids, while real kids were not your kids, in under the guise of them being your kids.
So those of you who say, just put the parents and the kids together, or just don't separate them, that is a childlike view of the situation.
Because that absolutely would be the best situation in the short run.
But if you ignore the long run that that sort of incentive would make things worse, you're not really an adult in the conversation.
Somebody's saying build the wall.
The wall is going to take a while, and it's not going to stop people from trying to do this for a long time.
So you need a short-term situation and a long-term.
Now, here's another idea along the same lines.
Do you remember when Uber was brand new?
And how you felt the first time you could look at your app and you'd know where the Uber car was?
Do you remember how psychologically that was, like, completely different from just hoping your taxi showed up?
A complete different psychological thing.
So could you imagine, for example, and maybe they have this, but I don't know about it.
Imagine, if you will, that there's some kind of electronic sign board or something else That tells the people in there how long they're likely to be there.
Now it could be, you know, they don't know exactly every time, sometimes it takes longer, but there might be some way, I'm just brainstorming here, that the people there could see a countdown clock that will at least give them an approximate time.
So they could say, okay, I've been here for a day, but I can see on the clock, this is sort of a day and a half situation.
I can make it a half a day.
I'll see my parents in half a day.
Oh, by the way, I know they're looking at me on these robots.
So psychologically, you could transform the situation from, I don't know what's going to happen, To I do know what's going to happen.
And from I don't know what's happening with my children to, oh, there are my children.
I wish I were there.
This is terrible. But at least I know they're getting food and, you know, I see my kids smiling and that feels better.
So here's the macro idea.
Separate the physical problem, which is literally people kept in cages or facilities that they can't get out of.
You could call it a cage.
You could call it not a cage.
But here's the rule.
If it's your kid, it's a cage.
If it's somebody you don't know, it might be a holding facility, right?
So let's stop kidding each other about what we call these things.
If it's your frickin' kid, that thing's a cage.
That's it. That's the end of the story.
It's your kid, that's a cage.
If it's conceptual immigration, you know, mitigation, and you don't have to see it, and it's not your kid, and it's nobody you'll meet, then maybe you have the freedom of saying, well, it's a containment, detention, halfway, you know, facility, shelter, you know, you can use other words for it.
But if it's your kid, that's a frickin' cage.
So let's not word think this and think that we've done something.
And also, let's forget about this, Obama did it too.
It's true, it's helpful, gives us context, it's useful, but it doesn't mean anything.
Because Obama's not president.
It just doesn't mean anything.
So stop acting like that's some kind of a excuse.
It's not. Now, I've told you many times about the power of the visual persuasion.
Imagine any of this conversation Without the word cage or the photos that showed people in cages, some of them were actually from 2014, but the detention facilities, I just saw pictures on Business Insider showing, I don't know what you'd call it, but it was like a fenced-in inner area within a larger area that looked like a big cage.
You could say it's not a cage, but if you're in a container that you can't get out of I'm gonna call it a cage.
So the visual of this which we didn't have before or at least people didn't spread them around as much during the Obama administration allowed it to be a concept and apparently since they were doing less of it or trying to do less of it it was less of a political issue but now when there's more of it and and there's pictures The Trump administration is going to need to do something because they're getting beaten
badly on this. And there's nothing that I can support in this conversation except that, well, no, I can't support anybody in this conversation.
You know, it is true that the Trump administration is trying for a long-term solution.
But the way they're handling it is so poor that I can't give them a pass on this whatsoever.
Just because of the way they're handling it.
And by the way, that doesn't mean there's a better way to handle it.
That doesn't mean there's a better solution.
If anybody had a better solution, I think they would have suggested it.
It's not a solution to just stop doing it.
Because that just gets you back to the problem you had that you were trying to fix before.
You just changed the problem. So if anybody has an idea, I'm all over it.
If there's any way we can get some, what are they called, double robotics iPad robots into, let's say, just a few facilities, see if it makes any difference.
I'm sure you could give funding for it fairly quickly.
So, Scott watches news, sees pictures, reverses course.
I don't think I've reversed course.
Have I? What would be something that I said before that I'm not saying now?
I'm not aware of any reverse of course.
I'm framing it differently, but that's different than a reverse of course.
Did you imagine that there was some point in Somebody says, yes you have, right after, yes you haven't.
Here's what you think is a reversing course.
Somehow you imagined that I was in favor of kids in cages.
You must have somehow imagined that.
Is there anybody who was in favor of that?
I don't think so. Made fun of the Democrats for the point?
Oh, well...
But I'm making fun of everybody.
Making fun of the wrong word.
I'm criticizing everyone.
The Democrats...
Have quite masterfully turned this into a political weapon that's quite powerful.
So if we're talking about just the persuasion element of it, the Democrats are just kicking ass on this.
There's no question about that.
But if you're talking about the human element of it, this is a complete government breakdown.
You're wrong.
Only the media are outraged.
you I don't think that's the case.
I think it is true that Republicans are less bothered by this because they're looking at the long term.
And I've made this point before that it seems, I don't know if I made it on this point before, but I will.
It seems to me that the Republicans, just generally, conservatives in general, are sort of the parental party.
As in, this will hurt in the short term, but in the long term it's going to be better.
And the Democrats are kind of stuck in the short term, which is, why can't you give us all candy?
I don't understand. Why can't we just eat candy?
And then the parents say, well, candy's okay once in a while, but you have to have a meal or else you'll die if you just eat candy.
And then the children say, but I like candy and I don't like roast beef.
So why can't I just eat candy?
So that's sort of where we are.
Why can't I have candy versus how do we fix it in the long term?
But the long term people are totally blowing the short term and the short term people are completely ignoring the long term.
That's why I say you've got two parties in complete failure mode.
Complete failure mode.
Both sides and the White House.
Complete failure mode.
I can't think of anything else Can you?
Well, maybe healthcare.
Healthcare, I think, is complete failure mode as well.
So I think immigration and healthcare are complete government failure mode.
Democrats, Republicans, White House, across the board, complete failure.
All right.
Is there anything else happening today?
Yeah, this is a really good.
Immigration is good as an attack because it's complicated.
Whenever you've got a situation that's complicated, you have the opportunity to attack because people can't check your facts.
So the Russian thing was complicated.
That was great. It worked great as an attack.
The OIG report, people are seeing whatever they want to see because it's complicated.
Nobody understands it. Taxes, nobody understands.
Trade, nobody really understands.
So wherever you have these complicated situations, and immigration certainly is complicated.
They got you reeled in on this one, Scott.
Explain, so, you know, you hear me talk about tells for cognitive dissonance.
Whoever just said, they've got you reeled in on this, Scott.
If you had a reason, I'm pretty sure it would have been there.
You just don't like the fact that I just made your opinion look ridiculous, whatever your opinion was, apparently.
Because the people who just say, you're wrong, Scott, or they reeled you in, or you're really gullible, you would give me a reason.
It wouldn't be that hard.
You've got a lot of characters here.
You could fit something in, maybe not the details, but you could say, well, I think you're wrong about there is no solution, because there is.
You might say something like that.
Reasons already stated?
Give me one. Give me one reason that tells me that my take on this, sometimes you're not fully informed.
That's what I just said.
You fell for the emotion.
Okay, so somebody's saying that I'm falling for the emotional argument.
And the answer is, the emotional argument didn't exist until recently.
But now that it's here, it's a fact.
The emotional argument is not imagination.
Because the way people are feeling is the fact.
They're feeling a certain way.
So not only are the parents and the children feeling a certain way, being separated, but the public is feeling a certain way.
This is new facts.
If somebody is crying, it doesn't help to say, there's no reason to cry.
You have to deal with the fact that they're crying.
So I'm dealing with facts that, independent of what I personally feel about this situation, America has now worked itself into a lather so that their emotional feeling has been ginned up to the fact level.
It's what we have to deal with.
So when I say that the government has failed, They've allowed this emotional thing to rise up and they're not handling it in any kind of inefficient manner.
The issue here is that the moment you say children rip from parents and children in cages, there's no other side to the argument.
And the moment you pretend there's another side to that argument, you've lost the argument.
So you should never take the other side.
Once the words, children, cages, ripped from parents, as soon as that's in the conversation, everybody's on the same side.
What's different is what suggestions people have to fix it.
It's the only thing that's different.
There's nobody on the other side.
There is one side that's giving a long-term solution without a short-term.
There's another one that's offering a short-term solution without a long-term.
These are not serious players.
Nobody's a serious player if they're not looking at both the short-term and the long-term.
So that's a complete failure of government right there.
The suggestion is the parents stop breaking the law.
Well, that's a practical suggestion there.
Why don't you go talk to those people in poverty in El Salvador and tell them that they should stop trying to get across the border.
I'm sure that will help. Short-term, long-term is false dichotomy.
It's a false dichotomy that nobody's making because you need to do both.
Why is immediate deportation not an option?
Mmm.
Umm.
I'll give you a few reasons.
Number one is that, and again, all of us are under-informed about immigration, so I'll just prove how under-informed I am.
A lot of the people coming across are not Mexican citizens.
If they were Mexican citizens, it seems like it would be easier just to say, here's the door, go back on the other side.
You know, presumably they just try to get in again.
But if they're from El Salvador, you can't deport them to a different country.
You can't deport an El Salvadorian refugee to Mexico.
You know, because there's somebody on the other side of the door in Mexico saying, hello, it's Mexico, what do you have for us?
How about you take some El Salvadorians who don't live in Mexico, and they go, thank you, no, no thank you.
Close the door. How did they get into Mexico?
Illegally. They just came up the southern border.
Why not be sad about American criminals being separated?
I am sad about that.
Somebody's actually trying to call me first thing in the morning.
What's up with that? Drop off in Canada.
Who pays for their trip?
Good question. It's all manufactured hysteria and you fell for it.
No, I think you're not listening to this.
I'm saying that there is a manufactured hysteria and that the country has fell for it.
So now it's a real thing because people are dealing with it as their top issue.
You are correct in saying that if people were to rank the things that matter the most to them, it wouldn't be anywhere near the top.
I don't know.
Two weeks ago it wouldn't have been in the top 50 probably because you'd never even heard of it.
So you're right that this is a ginned up hysteria which is still around a real problem.
It's a real thing that children are being separated from their parents, which is not good for the children.
But there's certainly a difference between a child in a cage and a child who's staying with a relative who didn't go to jail.
Those are fundamentally different.
And anytime we try to think in these weird analogies like concentration camps or jail or why is it like school or camp or the Holocaust or why is it like going to jail?
None of those situations are the same.
These are just things that Remind you of other things.
So when I tell you that it's bad for children to be taken away from adults, I'm not buying into the hysteria.
I'm talking about the news that's on the front page, the thing we have to deal with because it's the thing that's moving the country.
So the fact that your logic says we shouldn't worry about it is irrelevant because we're already worrying about it.
In other words, your world is the things that you see and feel and experience and care about.
That's your reality, and that reality has changed for all of us.
Our reality is different because the way we see things and feel things and care about has been manipulated by the Democrats, primarily, really effectively.
Very, very effectively.
And when somebody says you fell for the whatever, the propaganda or the hysteria, keep in mind that this is the type of thing that could bring down a government.
It's the type of thing people rally behind and say, ah, it's Hitler coming.
So it's a big deal psychologically.
Remember I said in the beginning that the physical part is actually people going from a horrible situation, trying to make it all the way up to the border, thousands of miles through danger and, you know, underfed and everything else.
They're actually physically, they're in a better place.
Because they're fed and they're cared for.
They've got health care for the first time.
They probably have showers for the first time in however long, if ever.
So physically, they're actually in a better place.
Psychologically, the world is reacting to it in a certain way, and that reaction is real.
So, those of you, you're using magical thinking if you're saying, ah, I think there's no problem because in my mind there isn't one.
Well, that's not really the world you live in.
The world you live in is that people are pretty torqued up about this for psychologically manipulative reasons, and that's real.
Now you have to deal with the reality that people are torqued up.
My personal feeling on this doesn't really have much to do with anything.
Cloward and Piven, what's that mean?
Let them have sit down dinners with their parents.
I don't know if they're all physically near each other.
So I think there's a distance and a quantity of people problem.
Yeah, I don't know that that's practical.
And by the way, the critics, I think have to be held to task.
To come up with their alternative plan and describe what it leads to.
Start with a few.
Starting with a few would be helpful, especially if they could come back with, I suppose, stories of, hey, everybody looks okay over there.
There's a Cloward Piven solution.
I'll look that up. Oh, overwhelm the system.
So that doesn't sound good.
My whole family is...
You're saying that the ordinary people are not talking about it?
Well, let me ask you this. What are your friends saying about this?
Tell me the reaction from friends.
Because... I've seen lots of people realize that it's a big issue politically.
I have to admit, I don't know that I've seen anybody in person.
I haven't really talked to too many people in person about this.
So I guess I haven't talked to anybody about it.
Oh, your girlfriend is crazed over this.
Somebody's saying not an issue.
to just reading your comments.
Nothing.
Friends don't care about it.
People are saying, yeah.
My aunt cried for 30 minutes after watching CNN. Yeah, I don't know how many people have to be moved by this for it to be a big issue.
If 10% of the public is deeply affected by it, that's enough to change the world.
And this is something I've talked about before.
If you have an issue, That everybody is a little bit concerned about, it probably is an irrelevant issue.
Even if everybody's on the same page and everybody's concerned about it, but they're just sort of concerned.
That doesn't move the needle.
But if you have 10% of any public Who are super emotional and care about an issue, that 10%, somebody's saying closer to 2%, but 10% is better, just for the example, that moves the needle.
10% of people really, really caring changes the world.
Yeah, somebody's saying it's a Democrat talking point.
It's more than that.
And when I mean more than that, a talking point sort of suggests that it doesn't make much difference in the real world, but this is something which has taken on a bigger feeling, and politically it's dynamite.
It's a nuclear bomb, politically.
Somebody says, we can see through the hysteria, you should too.
What is it that I said that suggests I don't see through the hysteria?
I literally describe this as the people being in a more comfortable situation compared to the danger that they took to get here.
It's temporary. They are cared for physically in every way.
And of course we have to have laws that work in the long term.
Is there anything that sounded like hysteria in that?
And the public is worked up about it.
That's just a fact.
Right? And the psychology of the people involved could be probably a lot better.
Because when kids and parents can't see each other, there is a psychological stress.
Is anybody disagreeing with anything I've said so far?
So your characterization of me as a comic, ironically, comic character who can't see the whole picture, I believe does not match the facts.
Because I just described it in a way that I think 100% of you would agree with.
So if 100% of you agree with me, tell me one thing you don't agree with.
with go.
Tell me one thing you don't agree with.
I'm a biased liberal.
No, that's not something that you disagree with.
Tell me what I said that you don't agree with.
Yeah. That we should care.
I'm not telling you you should care.
I'm telling you people do.
That's an observation that you agree with.
I'm not saying you should care.
I'm saying people do.
That's a fact now.
Other people care.
You agree with that.
Don't pretend that you disagree with me because you don't.
Somebody says, I don't agree it's a nuclear bomb.
So somebody doesn't agree it's a good political issue.
I think the experts are going to be pretty much on my side on this.
So here's how this works.
The fact that it gets a lot of attention is what makes it important.
And because it's the sort of story that the news is going to ride mercilessly, it will rise in the calculation of voters, you know, in their minds it will rise in importance just because it's getting this much attention and it has the phrase children in cages as part of the conversation.
That's just a fact.
Whatever gets the most attention is what the public will perceive as important, even if you individually, Bob, don't agree.
That's irrelevant that you think Bob differently than the public.
The public is going to be moved by what the news coverage is.
And the news coverage is focusing on this as a Hitlerian move, and that's going to move the needle.
It's absolutely... Powerful.
How does it rate with Russian collusion?
Similar. Similar.
Oh, God.
Somebody else saying, you're falling for the hysteria.
Did you just fucking sign on?
What part of me saying...
That people are physically being better taken care of than they were when they were coming across.
But psychologically, it's bad for the parents and the kids.
You agree with it, and you see that the public is getting worked up.
Did I say that I'm suffering some hysteria over this?
Is there anything I said that would suggest that comment make sense?
I think I'm going to block anybody who says that again, because that's just not even trying.
You're not even trying.
More liberal propaganda.
It is liberal propaganda, but it's really, really good.
Meaning that it's effective.
It's doing what the propagandists want to do.
It's very effective.
Somebody says, oh, so you'd like to capitulate and lose...
No. Did anything I say sound like I want to capitulate?
leave Bob ripping children from their mothers I'm not saying that's my characterization.
I'm saying that's what the news is reporting.
Child Protective Services.
So somebody probably wants me to mention that Child Protective Services does remove children from adults.
Now in those cases, the adult that they're being removed from is an immediate danger.
That is not the situation here.
It's another reason that I say analogies are not thinking.
If you have made any of the following analogies, you are not part of the thinking class.
And I'm going to be fair because these are on both sides of the political spectrum.
If you've made an analogy to Hitler, you're not thinking.
If you've made an analogy to child protective services, you're not thinking.
If you made an analogy to school, which I did, but people didn't realize I was joking when I did it.
I was actually mocking somebody else's analogy, but it probably didn't look that way on Twitter.
If you're making an analogy of this to anything else, you're not part of the solution, you're not thinking, because this isn't like anything else.
It is only its own thing.
If you can't deal with it on its own merits, And you have to rely on an analogy to make your case, whether you're making it that it's more like Auschwitz or the other side is making it that it's just like child protective custody.
How is it different than any parent going to jail?
Those are just different situations.
They're just different and have to be treated that way.
But I would agree with you on the big point that there are normal situations in which children and parents are separated.
Would Trump visiting and seeing them happy help?
You know, I wondered about that, but probably not.
There are too many ways that could go wrong.
Somebody say, it's like a criminal being taken from their kid.
No, that's an analogy.
If you can't deal with an actual situation, Just leave the conversation.
If what you want to talk about is somebody else's situation that's different, you're just now part of the conversation.
So don't pretend that you are.
You're talking about another situation with different variables.
It's like daycare, somebody said.
Alright. Interesting no one mentions Kate Steinle here because it's not really important to this conversation.
There's nobody on the side of more crime from illegal immigrants.
There's nobody on that side.
You don't need to mention the obvious.
Stop taking in 250 kids.
is what do you do with them?
They're already on our side of the border.
All right.
Why are they not considered invaders?
um Well, that is word thinking.
Word thinking. You can call them whatever you want.
It doesn't change what it is.
It doesn't change what you do about it.
Changing the name for it doesn't change your strategy.
We need more immigrants for farming.
I believe that's true, actually.
I believe that we do need more workers than we have, especially for the farming segment.
But that's a separate issue.
Alright, I think I've said too much about this already.
I'll tell you, I'm way more mad at the quality of thinking about this than I am about even the situation itself.
Because it's the quality of thinking that's so poor, you know, the analogy thinking and the failure to recognize a short-term and a long-term problem.
Those are just gigantic failures in thinking, which allows, by the way, which allows your government to be worthless.
Ultimately, the responsibility is that the government, Democrats, Republicans, the White House have all failed us on this, on immigration in general.
They've failed. But they can get away with it because we, the citizens, rely on analogies that are stupid and ignoring the long-term, short-term difference.
As long as we do that, our government can do anything it wants because the citizens just aren't in the game at all.
Alright, that's all for now.
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