NAFTA

Yeah and the vote in the House was 102 yea and 156 nay for Democrats. 132 yea and 43 nay for Republicans.

It’s a pretty big reach that NAFTA was a significant contributor to the software industry. The WWW, dot.com, FAANG all happen without NAFTA. NAFTA just happened to go into effect right after Mosaic and right before IE.

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My entire adulthood has been pure partisanship outside of funding the military etc so this is just weird to see.

Because it’s not that much different than the funding of the military. It was FP.

eta: Well, because it was a Republican policy being pushed by a Democrat. That’s why conservative Democrats are more dangerous than Republicans. They get a bunch of D votes because of party and they get R votes because of policy.

The harm was concentrated in American communities that had manufacturing plants that were the foundations of their communities packed up and shipped abroad. Ford shareholders might benefit but Dayton, Youngstown, Flint and a hundred other towns were transformed from wealthy working class cities to cities filled with unemployed drug addicts. But at least the syringes they use to inject fentaynl are a little bit cheaper than they might otherwise be.

I agree with you that there can be a better way to engage without the f-ing stupid type comments. I’m glad you are posting ITT & ITF, even though we have some differences in perspective and analysis. Your thoughts are welcome here. Even though, like micro & catface, I’m skeptical about the efficacy of the epistemology behind your assertion.

Your evaluation of the merits of complex economic issues was “these bad people support it, so it must be bad”.

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It’s just a lazy way to smear a position without going through with all the bother of actually arguing against it.

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Whatever. I have been taking out frustrations here without offering anything constructive for a while now. You’re right that was hostile. It was unnecessary. I’m sorry. The same goes to other people who I’ve been unfair to recently. I’m gonna work on getting my shit together and get to a place where I contribute something more than venom here.

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200 (5)

For real though: I appreciate what you bring to the forum.

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I find you to be one of the best posters on this site, so regardless of whatever changes you make to your posting style I hope you continue to bring the same perspectives, even if they’re occasionally harsh.

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Yeah, or if you ever leave the site gimme your email. Or just continue to PM me like all the people who have “left” the site so we can have secret threads that the rest of you jamokes don’t even know about.

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Converting a fallacy into mathematical form doesn’t make it suddenly not a fallacy. Bayesian analysis isn’t useful if you’re gonna pretend that one cherry-picked piece of information is the only data point in existence. That’s just garbage-in-garbage-out.

I can reach the opposite conclusion by the same method: Noam Chomsky’s opposition to NAFTA is strong Bayesian evidence of it being bad. Direct quote:

It’s great for rich people in Mexico, it’s great for rich people in the United States, and it’s bad for everybody else.

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I hesitate to go further, for fear of further rebuke from you and everyone else, but there a thousands of other examples of Trump/Perot being wrong on economic issues. I only mentioned the one, because I assumed everyone was aware of their general backgrounds.

Trump and Perot have much higher miss rates than Chomsky (anyone) has hit rates. Your example is also weaker on that front.

The point is that you don’t figure out if something is good by evaluating its supporters and detractors. You evaluate the thing.

Of course. But when the thing is complex, abstruse, and susceptible of demagoguing, the use of as I put it a heuristic is useful. Obviously everyone here either fully understands the ramifications of NAFTA and all possible counterfactuals or at least is comfortable putting forward that facade and so my heuristic is worthy of derision. I understand that much.

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My “single data point” remark wasn’t referring to the number of times Trump has been wrong, but rather the single piece of info (Trump’s opinion) plugged into your Bayes formula as though we’re in a vacuum save for that one fact. My Chomsky example was to show that if I place myself into a different vacuum with only Chomsky’s words, now I’m the one who gets to appeal to Bayes. But all this really does is make Bayes roll in his grave.

Apologies if I’m just stating the obvious, but the combination of your Bayes post and

I assert a position on the economy is very likely bad b/c Perot/Trump/Paul VEHEMENTLY endorse it

made me think it needed to be said.

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