Back to episode — Episode 116 - Facts are not Influencing the Immigration Debate
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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. All right so someone says you don't ge…
← Previous segment →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 gonna 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 the 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 mine. Now you should say you should but it doesn't matter because it doesn't. It just doesn't.
And one of the things I added to that to the tweet that I'll refer 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 you're guilty. How in the world are you gonna change somebody's mind 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. 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 are 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, Constitution, guns, our brains just go all right. And there's no fact that's going to help any of that make any difference.
All right that's enough about that.
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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. And I'll see you all later.
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