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June 24, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
39:16
Episode 116 - Facts are not Influencing the Immigration Debate
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Ba dum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
Some of you are not in church right now and you are joining me for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Do you know what Coffee with Scott Adams goes well with?
Besides coffee?
And besides you? Sunday!
Sunday morning. It feels so good.
Join me, will you, in the simultaneous sip?
Oh, that's good.
That's some good simultaneous sipping.
So, is it my imagination, or is the summer of love not turning out quite the way I had hoped?
So, I had two...
I had two predictions, which I didn't realize until recently, were in conflict.
In other words, I had predicted two things that couldn't both be true, and I had acted like maybe they could.
So let me start by telling you how dumb I am.
I had two predictions that can't both be true.
One I think was more wishful thinking.
I said that this would be the summer of love and people would be nicer to each other.
Well, that's clearly wrong.
But I had another prediction that seems to be spot on.
So if there's any lesson here, you should make two predictions that are completely opposite because one of those damn predictions is going to be right.
So the other one was that when President Trump got a good result with North Korea that would cause Trump derangement syndrome To kick into a higher level.
Against all odds.
Now if I said to you, alright, Mr.
Logic, Mr.
Rational, or Mrs.
or Miss, whoever you are, you're a rational person, tell me what do you think will happen to Trump Derangement Syndrome when the economy is great that they didn't expect President Trump gets good progress on North Korea that they didn't expect.
And, importantly, the Russia collusion investigation fizzles into nothing.
What would be the logical outcome of such a thing?
Mr. Logical?
Miss Logical? You're probably saying to yourself, well, logically, I guess all the Trump derangement syndrome would dissipate.
And people would just start getting reasonable after that.
But what did I tell you would happen?
The opposite.
I told you that the better President Trump does, especially when he does things that are so unexpectedly better, such as progress in North Korea, and if he starts getting some progress with trade deals, and I would say that he has gotten some progress, if he starts getting progress with trade deals, It's gonna be full out, bouncing off the wall, looniness, and we're just about there.
So, to reiterate, the Summer of Love did not come out the way I had hoped.
To be honest, that was more of a, I was hoping to promote it more than predict it, but the actual prediction was that cognitive dissonance would make people crazier, not less crazy.
Now, let me read to you some quotes I'm seeing this morning.
So Jennifer Rubin writes for the Washington Post, and she says, I think she's talking about Sarah Sanders being ejected from the Red Hen restaurant.
Jennifer Rubin writes, it is not altogether a bad thing to show those who think they're exempt from personal responsibility that their actions bring scorn, exclusion, and rejection.
In other words, she's supporting Sarah Sanders being driven out because people have a different opinion.
Now, isn't that some Nazi stuff right there?
Didn't Jennifer Rubin just become the Nazi?
Because she seems completely unaware of the fact that half of the country would consider what she's saying right now, plus other things she's said and written, to be completely irresponsible.
Indeed, they're so irresponsible that it's put the country at the verge of civil war over basically nothing.
And Her standard is that if something genuinely seems to you to be over the line, then it's okay to show your scorn and your derision and to reject.
This doesn't end well.
It's pretty much the opposite of, at least the concept of, I know this is not technically, you know, you're going to disagree with me technically, but just the vibe of it.
Anti-free speech.
Because the whole point of free speech is people get to say unpleasant things, but we still live together.
Now I realize that free speech is about the government and not about citizen to citizen stuff.
But if citizens can do what government used to be able to do, which is censor, citizens are the government now.
By the way, I've argued this before.
In the old days, the government was in charge and told the citizens what to do, sort of, at least in between elections.
At the moment, the citizens are in charge through social media, and the government is largely responsive in real time.
You saw that with the president reversing himself on the families staying together.
The public is in charge.
In the old days when the Constitution was written, it was assumed that the only entity that could really make a difference to your free speech was the government.
And so the Constitution said, hey, government, you cannot abridge people's free speech.
The part they left out, because they could not have seen 200 years later that the government would not be in control, but rather the people are in control through social media and the government just responds, That now the power to take away your free speech lies with the people.
And we don't have a law against that.
We don't have a constitution that says people can't discriminate against people.
And I don't know how you could enforce it anyway.
But the point is that free speech is no longer practical.
It's still legal.
But it's not practical.
General Hayden said this morning, let me find General Hayden's tweet, which I've also retweeted.
You can find both of these in my Twitter feed.
General Michael Hayden said, so exactly when do we send up the warning flare?
He's talking about Nazi stuff.
He says, after the torchlight parade chanting blood and soil.
After the White House press office becomes a ministry of propaganda?
After we punish a marginalized population asking for a friend?
So I called him a Nazi.
Because that sounds like a Nazi, doesn't it?
Now, fair is fair.
What he's saying is that there are some things that are happening that reminds him of Nazis.
And I would say, okay, those things do remind people of Nazis.
What he's doing right now, also legitimately, there's no joke here at all, legitimately what he's doing reminds me of a Nazi.
Did we gain anything by him calling you guys a Nazi and me calling him a Nazi?
Not really. And we're both right.
In the sense that we're both just being reminded of stuff.
It doesn't mean he is a Nazi.
It doesn't mean you're a Nazi.
Anybody else is a Nazi.
But if it's good enough to just be reminded of Nazis, then I think that's got to apply both ways.
So you may have noticed in my Twitter feed that when the critics are coming over, if they have a point about something, I'll engage them in a normal conversation.
If they disagree with me, we can talk about facts and arguments and stuff.
But when the haters are coming over and it's just personal, I call them a Nazi because they remind me of Nazis, and then I block them.
And I just say, I block Nazis.
And then I, you know, I block them.
Now, it seems to me that the people calling people Nazis probably think that's the worst thing you could be called.
And so returning it seems like an effective strategy because they're getting to feel what they're giving out.
So If I'm reminded of a Nazi by their actions, meaning they've identified a group of society to say you people are bad people, and that's what they've done.
They're saying Trump supporters should be singled out for actually retribution.
That's Nazi stuff.
Now, I'm not saying that the other side doesn't see things that remind them of Nazi things, because they do.
But everybody is reminded of Nazi things all the time.
Everything we don't like looks a little bit Nazi.
So let's just not pretend it's going one direction anymore.
Now, here's a thought that I've been having that's growing stronger in me.
Most of you who have been following me for a while know that I'm not a Republican and that I don't vote.
And I don't vote because I don't like to be influenced into team politics, even though at this point I am.
But because I've been labeled as a Trump supporter, I've already told you that I've got one exception coming up, but I stopped appearing in public.
And I'm quite serious about not appearing in public because of the physical danger where I live, especially in Northern California.
I just don't think it would be safe.
And I was thinking to myself, what would happen if Trump got, let's say there was a blue wave and Trump got impeached?
I think it would be a dangerous situation for Trump supporters, wouldn't you?
And I'm feeling like the best reason for Republicans to vote is that they're coming for you next, and they're not hiding it.
They're coming for Trump right now, but they're making it pretty clear they're coming for Trump supporters next.
The one and only way to protect yourself is to make sure they lose the election.
So they've somehow made the only situation that, you know, it's amazing the bad strategy you see on the left.
But, The big way that anybody wins a midterm is by turnout, right?
So whoever gets the best turnout wins.
Because the sides are roughly even.
The races that are even are the ones that matter.
So turnout is the tiebreaker.
Who's going to get more turnout?
I have a feeling the Republicans are going to be physically frightened.
Because it's real now.
The left has made it clear that this is personal now, and this is citizen to citizen.
And probably the safest thing you could do, if you're a Republican, is to help get out the vote.
Because it's going to be a dangerous place around here if the president gets impeached.
I'm not wrong about that, right?
Impeachment is the point where the risk of something snapping It's pretty high.
Right now, there's a lot of bend.
We have a system that allows things to get pretty excited, and it bends a little bit, and then it just goes back.
At the moment, I'm not worried about a revolution.
If President Trump gets impeached, while his performance is similar to what it is now, You know, 90% support on his side.
That's a dangerous situation.
And I'm actually considering voting for the first time.
And I wouldn't even vote.
I wouldn't even be voting for candidates.
I would just be voting for a side.
I would just say Republican.
And I'm not a Republican.
It's not even about policies, about anything.
It would be just pure self-defense.
Because I would want the safest situation for the country.
So, here's the get out the vote slogan that I think is the strongest for Republicans.
They're coming for you next.
You know it's true.
They are coming for you next.
And if you want to be safe, you probably want to keep the system intact as long as possible.
Alright, let's talk about immigration.
So I think many of you heard me as recently as yesterday say that immigrants have a lower crime rate than citizens, and that that fact is influencing part of the discussion.
And when you look into it, it turns out that there had not been any studies about illegal immigrants, which are really the point.
Illegal immigrants had not been studied until just recently.
So only yesterday I saw Tucker Carlson talking about the first statistics about just the illegal immigrants and their crime.
And according to this one source, which by the way I would expect to be debunked by lunchtime today, but according to that one source, illegal immigrants actually do have a much higher crime rate.
Whereas the legal immigrants, you would not be surprised to know that someone who had gone through the process of becoming a legal resident are people who like following rules.
They are the people who follow the rules.
That's how they became legal citizens, legal or legal immigrants.
They're rule followers.
So don't be surprised that they also follow the law.
That should surprise no one.
But the illegal ones had not been studied and the pro-immigration group had cleverly conflated the legal and the illegal so you couldn't tell what was going on.
Now that this statistic is out, that very unambiguously says that say the murder rate is way higher for the illegal immigrants, only illegal immigrants we're talking about, Wouldn't you expect, because you're all logical and rational people, and you love your facts, wouldn't you suspect that that would just change everything?
That would change the debate, right?
Now that it's objectively shown, That President Trump was totally right.
That there's a higher crime rate coming in illegally than is already here.
So immigration is a crime thing.
Should change everything, right?
No. No.
It will change nothing.
And you're going to watch this right in front of you.
And if you didn't see Tucker interview a pro-immigration, I don't know if that's the right way to characterize him, but look in my Twitter retweets today, and you'll see Tucker Carlson's interview from last night, I guess, in which he talked to somebody about this new fact that Now we know, according to this one source, that again will probably be debunked on Snopes by lunchtime because they need to debunk it.
So there will be enough debunking whether it's true or not Whether the debunking is true or not doesn't have anything to do with the fact that it's going to happen.
So expect some debunking, valid or not, until this data becomes a little murkier in our minds.
But anyway, so Tucker is interviewing this guy, and Tucker has the goods on him.
I mean, he just has the goods on him.
And because of this new data that says the illegal immigrants, just the illegal ones, have a much higher crime rate.
And so how does this person respond to a new set of facts that completely blows his old argument out of the water?
He pretends that he's answering a different question Over and over again.
So no matter how many times Tucker asked him to deal with the fact that it's now a fact that illegal immigrants, illegal immigrants only, have a higher crime rate, you know, how does he address that?
And he kept saying, well that's why you need sanctuary cities.
And he just refused to deal with the new fact.
So we saw that facts did not matter.
So there was a guy who went on television, it was his job to defend against this kind of argument, and he wouldn't even talk on the topic.
And it's the only topic that matters.
In this whole debate, that fact that Tucker gave him that there's a high crime rate of illegal immigrants, illegal immigrants.
And by the way, that's the way you should always say it.
If you're talking about this, always go, illegal immigrants, illegal immigrants.
Because then when you take it out of context later, you can say, don't you remember me saying illegal immigrants, illegal immigrants?
Because you keep talking about the legal ones, and I'm not talking about that.
Everybody loves...
We all love our legal immigrants.
Legal immigrants are the best, right?
Maybe some of you disagree, but in my experience, the immigrant population tends to be pretty awesome, frankly.
You may disagree, but I don't care.
So... So watch how much the new facts don't change a thing.
And you should not be surprised that it doesn't change a thing because it didn't change your minds when you thought it was the other way.
Alright, you're not going to like this next part.
So yesterday I had an argument with, not an argument, but some text exchanges with somebody who was saying, so remember this was way back yesterday, before we had this new information.
Yesterday seems like so long ago now.
So way back yesterday morning, when I was debating somebody on Twitter, I said, incorrectly, That there was a lower crime rate with immigrants.
But I also, when I first said it, didn't realize that I had also conflated legal and illegal immigrants.
And it's really the legal, legal, legal immigrants who have a lower crime rate than the average.
Which should be no surprise.
And I said, hey, you know, you're not going to win on crime.
You can't win the crime argument because they're not really bringing in extra crime on average, and just saying that somebody got killed by somebody who's illegal, well, that's not a strong persuasion, I was saying.
And people would say, no, no, the person is dead who didn't need to be dead.
So it doesn't matter that they would bring in less crime on average, when I believe that was true, It doesn't matter because a dead person is a dead person, and I don't care that the average illegal immigrant isn't bringing in any crime, which turns out not to be true, or the average one actually is not criminal, but they bring in a higher average criminal rate.
Let me stop and say that again.
The average illegal immigrant is law-abiding.
It's just that they bring a higher ratio of crime.
But still, the vast majority of them, just to be perfectly clear, completely law-abiding, except for coming into the country illegally.
So anyway, the point is, facts won't change anything.
I've been saying that the crime argument is sort of a loser.
Even though the facts might be on the President's side, and it appears that they are, it's a losing argument because you're branding one type of person as a criminal in the eyes of the opposition.
So the opposition can so easily conflate the illegal immigrants with the legal, and we'll do it forever now, because now they have to do it even harder, that it will be like talking to a wall.
So you'll be saying, well, you know, the legal immigrants are awesome.
We love them. But the illegal ones are bringing in more crime.
What will the opposition say?
Why are you calling all immigrants racist?
Why are you calling all immigrants rapists and criminals?
So there won't even be the same conversation.
The Republicans will say there's a specific...
Measured problem, let's try to close it.
The other side will say, well, that's what races say.
So that's the beginning and the end of the conversation.
See my Twitter feed for the Tucker Carlson retweet and the source will be in there.
So why do they do it, Scott?
What's their endgame? Well, for most of them, it's just team play.
I would say that the vast majority of people on the left are just simply opposed to the president.
They're just joining their team.
There's not anything like thinking or reason.
There's not a long-term purpose to it.
So you may remember that I challenged someone to explain to me why open borders was a good idea.
And I've learned a little, but I'm hoping you can guide me to what I'm still confused about, you know, to an answer to what I'm still confused about.
So someone pointed me on Twitter, someone pointed me to an article in which someone smart, an economist, was talking about the economic benefit of open borders.
And I thought to myself, alright, here it is, perfect.
It's an actual economist.
He'll use reason and facts.
And he'll give the argument for what's good about open borders because I didn't know the argument.
I didn't have an opinion because open borders to me sounds like you just don't have a border and anybody can do what they want and how could that possibly work?
So I thought I must be missing something in this open borders argument.
So here's what I'm missing.
It's probably what you're missing too.
Open borders...
Doesn't mean no border.
Open borders doesn't mean you don't have a wall.
It doesn't mean you don't have border control.
I thought it did.
I thought the point of an open border was you don't have any border control.
It doesn't mean that.
And because people are conflating what it does mean, which I'll tell you in a moment, with having no border...
Then open border sounds like just this awful thing to the right because they imagine no border.
Whereas the left are imagining open.
Open. Fewer restrictions.
Poor people can go where the jobs are.
Open. I like it.
So you're seeing when people are arguing for or against open border, they're not even on the same topic.
Let me tell you what open border means to the people who are defending it who actually are smart.
So the smartest people defending it have this argument that open border is really about allowing workers to move across borders with controls.
In other words, the workers don't get to just walk across the border.
The workers have to do the paperwork.
They have to apply. They have to come over.
They have to go back if they don't have a job.
But that employment would work across borders.
And the thought was that if you had more efficient Employment across borders that the entire economy would be better.
The obvious example of this is the farmers in this country who have trouble getting enough labor, especially seasonally.
For them, their business would be better.
The immigrants who came in legally, legally, legally, those immigrants would just help the economy, they'd make money, everybody wins.
So when people talk about open borders, they're talking about exactly what Trump wants.
Do you get that?
Trump is also in favor of open borders, explicitly.
He does want a system that allows people to come into work and to be documented.
and they would not have let's say voting privileges for example and open borders doesn't require that they vote it just wants them to get jobs so this entire open borders versus not open borders thing this is my tentative opinion and you saw how wrong i was about immigration crime yesterday so allow me to be fact checked by all of you but my understanding as of today Is that the open borders versus not open borders is a completely
fake debate because everyone is actually on the same side.
There's no one against that idea.
Have you ever heard anybody say we don't want a system where people can be brought in to fill needs that are not being filled in this country as long as they're documented and legal and it's all done above board?
Has anybody ever Have you ever seen anybody disagree with that idea?
President Trump is strongly in favor of open borders the way it is actually defined.
The people with the pink hats and marching in the streets, do you think that they understand what an open border is?
Do you think they could define it?
I don't think so.
Somebody says Soros has a different plan.
Does he? Does he?
Does Soros have a different plan than that?
Because if he does, well, let me say you might be right.
So that's exactly the sort of thing I want you to fact check me on.
If you could point me to an article in which Soros has said in his own words what open border means to him, I'd like to see that.
But I'll bet, I'll bet it's about jobs.
Yes, so we have an inefficient system for legally bringing in employees.
is And we should fix that system probably.
Higher Americans have better wages, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, you know, there are things you can do when the economy is strong that you just can't consider when it's weak.
So I've suggested, you saw this yesterday, that the amount of foreign workers that we bring in legally, legally, legally, the amount of foreign workers that we bring in legally should float with the unemployment rate.
So right now we're very close to what economists would call full employment, which means that even though some percent are unemployed, Those are just the people between jobs, changing jobs, retraining, etc.
So that you actually need some unemployment just to have a little bit of slop in the system so people can change jobs and there's a normal amount of unemployment that's good.
And we seem to be just about there.
So that means that basically any citizen could get a job already and probably a better job than the ones that are going to the So yes, if unemployment were terrible, you should take down your legal immigration for workers and vice versa.
You're saying, Scott, they literally write no borders on their signs.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So I'm saying that the people who are protesting Can't define what no borders means or open borders.
They just don't know what it means.
And I'm not even sure that the immigrants themselves, the illegal ones who are coming here for legitimate work purposes, you could argue whether that's legitimate, but they're coming to work as opposed to crime.
I would think that what they mostly care about is the ability to work.
I don't think the illegal immigrants are saying, damn it, I'm going to come into this country and get myself a vote.
I mean, they might think that would be good in the long run or something, but they're not coming to vote.
They're coming to work.
So like many things, politics has made something which everybody largely agrees on sound like it's cause for a civil war.
Sometimes you can't say yes hard enough.
Let me give you another example.
So, as many people have been saying, during the Obama administration, families were separated.
During the Trump administration, they were separated more aggressively, perhaps, because there were more of them, in part.
But everybody agrees that what Trump did was some sort of continuation and expansion of what was already happening.
Someone says you don't get the threat of alien culture.
Well, let me change topics for a moment.
If people are coming in with work visas, that's not the biggest risk in the world.
I forgot what I was talking about before that.
Somebody changed my thought process right in the middle.
Oh, okay, yeah.
So there was a big expansion of Families being separated.
But here's the thing.
Both sides agreed that there were situations in which kids must be separated.
And then when it became a bigger deal, you know, got more visibility, the public said, we can't stand for this.
We, the public, will not stand for this treatment of illegal immigrants.
And then the government responded and changed the rule.
The biggest story in the world is that the system worked.
The system being the press highlighted something.
Now, they may have taken it out of context, etc., but the result was the public cared.
The left cared and the right cared.
There wasn't anybody who was in favor.
Well, nobody serious who was in favor of separating families.
And then when this situation was brought to the government, the government said, okay, people really care about this.
I think I'll go fix that.
So the best news in the world is that the public...
The public had an opinion that was different from the government's, and the government immediately conformed to the public.
Oh, can I expand on my hypocrisy?
So, for those of you who didn't see it, I did a tweet about hypocrisy this morning.
It's in my Twitter feed. And I was saying that the hypocrisy claim, and I'm going to limit this to politics because it doesn't apply to your personal life, When you're calling the other side a hypocrite, for example, why are you saying that separating families is bad under Trump when you didn't say it was bad under Obama?
Well, my first statement is the hypocrisy claim has never changed anybody's mind.
So from a persuasion perspective, the hypocrisy claim is a sort of appeal to facts, and facts don't persuade anybody.
So people say, wait a minute, it was a fact that your side was doing this, and you were okay with it.
And now it's a fact that you're complaining about it when Trump does it.
So, therefore, you shouldn't complain.
That argument has never changed any mind in the history of the world.
It has never changed the mind.
Now, you should say, it should, but it doesn't matter, because it doesn't.
It just doesn't. And one of the things I added to that was, To the tweet that I'll refer to you to in my Twitter feed, is I said that one of the things the hypocrisy claim does in this context is it's a confession of your own problem.
So when you say, hey, Obama separated families too, you're saying too.
You're saying you're guilty.
How in the world are you going to change somebody's minds By confessing your guilt to something you agree is bad.
How did that ever work?
So as soon as you call the other side and you say the other side did it too, you just confess that you're doing it.
In this case, it's obvious that it was being done.
But the thing you're doing is either good or bad.
You can't change the past.
You can't change the past.
But if you just admitted you're doing it, you can certainly change the present.
So confessing you're doing something wrong is not exactly a good argument.
Yes, it was the law then, it's the law now.
Um... If facts don't matter, what does?
Emotions? How we feel?
Facts do matter to outcomes.
People get confused by that.
So when I say facts don't matter, I mean that we don't use them to make decisions.
We should. Wouldn't it be great if we did?
And there's a very minor area where facts and reason do get used.
And the very minor area where facts and reason do get used Or when there's no emotion in the topic.
So an engineer can use facts and reason because nobody feels badly about this component.
You just want it to work.
But as soon as you say, you know, children, life and death, rights, you know, constitution, guns, our brains just go, all right.
And there's no fact that's going to help any of that make any difference.
Alright, that's enough about that.
You can watch me calling the Nazis Nazis and think about your call to voting as they might come for you next.
So, vote in the midterms if you don't want them to come for you next.
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