Even though anyone with a brain knows it is bunk, economists — because their salaries depend on it — will zealously deny that immigration harms anyone’s job prospects.

Once again, historians know this isn’t true. Here’s a sentence from Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty!

Nonetheless, the war [WWI] unleashed social changes that altered the contours of American race relations. The combination of increased wartime production and a drastic falloff in immigration from Europe once war broke out opened thousands of industrial jobs to black laborers for the first time.

In other words, decreasing immigration enormously and directly benefited black Americans.

Look, I am in favor of immigration — at about 1/4 the current rate or so. I think that’s about what is sustainable socially.

Mainly, though, I want the arguments for or against it not to be based on lies and wishful thinking.

Why do people look for moral exemplars or moral clarity in artists? Entertainers? Novelists?

Do you really expect to find it there and if so, why? Why is this even important to you?

Artists are by nature transgressive. They have skeletons in their closets. If I ever became a famous writer, they could dig up whole graveyards about me. Without even trying.

Why this need to worship prostrate at the feet of artists and entertainers, and the utter disappointment when they fail to live up to your ideals? Hint: they never, ever will. Any artist worth a damn is transgressive by nature. That doesn’t just stop when they sign off for the evening or put the paintbrush or movie camera down.

No, this isn’t excusing their behavior or their actions. Artists don’t get a pass because of their other talents. But I’m telling you, and it will always be thus, that anyone who is truly creative won’t ever fit in the neat boundaries and delineations you wish to make for them. It just won’t happen.

Is the work good or not? is how I judge a creator. Beyond that, an artist being morally suspect is about what I’d expect to see, else they’d never produce anything worth watching or reading.

It is shocking even to me sometimes how terrible I am at math. How do I even breathe?

How many men who venerate Fight Club and its ethos as some guide to living have never been in an actual fight?

I’d bet the vast majority of them.

The obsession with where Trump spends his time is just as stupid now as it was with George W. Bush and as it was with Obama.

Who. Gives. A. Fuck.

It just does not matter.

I disbelieve that the Meyers-Briggs is not predictive in some scenarios, though I understand just fine what psychologists say about it and why.

However, I think at least 80% of the antipathy towards the test is because it was not developed by psychologists.

Meyers-Briggs is some aid in understanding one’s self better (just like tarot cards) and that has value even if it cannot be measured — and I’m very much an empirical, science-focused guy if you didn’t know.

But STEM types like to pretend that science is all there is, and in reality that’s just not true. The universe ain’t made of math and most things we just don’t know even if we have revealed by trial and travail some vital rules here and there. But they don’t scale and we can’t handle any composite cases with them (the dark secret of science).

Meyers-Briggs is a mostly-harmless diversion that doesn’t mean much, really. I also think psychologists despise it because it works at least as well as any tools they’ve developed — which is not well at all even for the “scientific” ones.

I have a tendency to quote rap lyrics around IT people and that doesn’t work out so well because most IT people don’t listen to rap.

I believe most just think I’ve lost my mind.

Need to make my filter tighter.

There’s a scene in The Leftovers where one of the main characters is shot in the chest by another character. Later on, the two become close friends.

At first I thought, “What kind of guy befriends someone who shot him in the chest?”

Then I realized — I am that kind of guy.

I mean, stuff happens. This is America. Can’t let getting shot in the chest stand in the way of a good friendship.

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