What to think of Stephen Colbert

 I've hardly ever watched Stephen Colbert's late night show, I'd seen him a few more times as the satirical character on Jon Stewart's show.  I only watched such things while staying with my sister and brother in law, who watched all the well known programs on CNN, HBO, MSNBC, CBS, and ABC.  I visited them for a week every year or two.  But after awhile, I got so pissed with such programs they never played them for me anymore, watching them behind closed doors if at all so as not to disturb me.

I got particularly upset after seeing how MSNBC personalities like Rachel Maddow were so anti-Bernie.  And then, right after the revelation of how the DNC had suppressed Bernie was made public, the very next day the entire dialog flipped to how Russia was influencing the election, based on claims which have been thoroughly debunked but Democrats refuse to let go of them.  This accomplished several things in one go.  And leading the pack with the new fabricated topic (which would dominate the airwaves of the most networks (except Fox) media (aka 'liberal' media) were just those stations and personalities.  It made me sick to my stomach.

To me it was all about changing the dialog from the way Bernie had been sidelined.

So I watched all the usual personalities on the late night shows.  And they all made me sick.   Don't even get me started on Maher, I hated him from Politically Incorrect which was as accurate title.  All except one.  That was Stephen Colbert.  He was very talented in avoiding all the cringy sermons and just hitting the jugulars.  I was sure that he was hired to do just that, within the bounds of 'liberal' corporate media like CBS.

I had remembered him from the right wing character he also played as Stephen Colbert.  He did it so perfectly, better than any real right wing character as he'd maintain the farce to the bitter end. 

It was hard to get used to him as host, but he was the one late night host I felt I could bear.  As I might do, he went for the big picture, not today's gotchas from partisans.  So he looked at Trump as Trump, not so much Russian Stooge or any of the partisan claims.  Of course that was too much for MAGA, so it's not surprising it ultimately led to...his show being ended, but it had a long incredible run.

None of which I ever watched by myself except the very last show, and it was great.

Now I see endless condemnations of Colbert not only from MAGA but from people I follow, fellow leftists.  He is castigated for his lack of 'confrontation' of such people as Kissinger.

But I see this in the context of his network CBS.  What Colbert did, dance around Kissinger's office, was far more entertaining and even challenging than anything done by the notably imperially sychophantic Face the Nation, who'd go after "important things" which were often as often as not rooted in nonsense, like the alleged rapes and baby killings* on October 7.

Colbert was our Court Jester.  And he did that job very well, as far as I have seen (which is 0.001%).  If he did not meet with Kissinger (btw, one of Hillary Clinton's best friends, Kissinger helped make Hillary into a Washington wonder girl just out of college) he wouldn't be suited for that job.

So I praise Colbert.  And he's the one of the very few talk show hosts I could have watched (I recall I liked Dick Cavett back in the day, not to mention Bill Moyers--one of my all time favorites).  But it may have been just as fine not to watch Colbert either.  I don't feel like I missed anything important, except his last show which I couldn't miss.  To do his job as well as he did, and he may not be the most honorable or knowledgable person in the world, but he was obviously a comedic genius, and a very sensitive one too, to be that good and still be on TV four times a week for eleven years, and occasionally even barb the President and other top dogs, so hard working too. 

He wasn't as great a comedian as, say, George Carlin, but George Carlin was only ever a talk show guest (most famously, 130 times with Johnny Carson, who was so "dumb" (his act) as to never be watchable even with smart ass Carlin).  Carlin was no where near as sensitive and thoughtful as Colbert.

(*No personal testimonies, videos, or hard evidence of rapes despite vast searching and endless propaganda to the contrary.  One baby was killed, "by accident".  Don't get me started on the official propaganda of "Russian atrocities" which are most often falsely labeled.  But that's all the sort of stuff your mind will be filled with on the 'serious' broadcast network news channels, which still have the largest audiences, need to the most advertising money to exist, and are heavily monitored and controlled by the powers that be.  Inevitably they are all about manufacturing consent for war.  It's better to watch their comedy shows, at least the best ones, if you can stand them.)

The only way AI can be for the common good

There is only one way to make AI work for the common good, and that is Communism.

There is a very similar set of issues wrt global heating.  Any solution to that at any time in our current trajectory (up, up, and over the cliff, crashing down, finally creating the next civilization) will require Communism, if not now then later, and the sooner the better.

Commanding Heights

I say Communism in the way that current Communist countries such as China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea understand it.  They recognize Communism as the movement created by Lenin and his successors known as Marxism Leninism.

Marxism Leninism has an evolving set of visions as to how to implement the best version of socialism, and it has varied from country to country, but Lenin's original concept still stands, the Central Committee of the People must control the Commanding Heights of the economy.

So that means that in China today there may be very rich people, and something akin to capitalism in operation, but they do not as a class control the direction of the economy. The People do.

Pure communism

There is a different notion of communism, the one with a lower case c, which represents the ultimate evolution of socialism, the one in which there is no oppression of any kind, including oppression from rentiers and capitalists and states themselves, and there is society of the kind envisioned by many spiritual leaders beforehand (including the Apostle Paul): "from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs."  I read Marx as grinning while he says this, knowing the religious origin of it, and not at all suggesting this will be short in coming.  First the Communist movement to create it needs to come into power and then they will need to work over time to achieve it.  The Communist revolution would be short in coming, but the ultimate achievement of socialism it defined--pure communism--which would take awhile or perhaps even be a never ending pursuit--which is to say, an ideal.  I believe that ideals are quite often necessary to give us focus, and otherwise we have nothing to endlessly pursue.

Nikita Khrushchev predicted pure communism, as a stateless and even moneyless society, would be achieved by 1980.  Instead, or course, USSR went neoliberal under Gorbachev who weakened the state and authority and popularity so much by permitting market control and even unemployment so that that western backed puppet Yeltsin could take over and wreck it completely.

Pure communism is a dicey proposition for marxists of all kinds to talk about because it is an ideal, and marxism of all kinds claims to be about materialism, not idealism.  But I see the ideal there in the famous phrase (and that's about it).  And that is what marxism is supposed to be about ultimately, and preferably with no time wasted except for decency, achieving.  Existence without any kind of exploitation.  

"Realm of Freedom" were Marx's ultimate words in Volume 3 of Capital, as a society in which no one would have to work, but instead develop their own human energy towards that which they valued including art, science, philosophy, and self-actualization.

Wild West AI

Current AI is a perfect illustration of the problems with Capitalism.  All the big money wants to be the biggest money by owning the next big thing, and damn everything else, the people, the environment, communities, electricity, water, future jobs, wasted people power to better fix global heating, etc.

Even when many critics, like me and Gary Marcus and Cory Doctorow say it's really just half baked yet.

Marcus and I and many other say that AI needs symbolic reasoning and built in human-like ideas and even basic 'knowledge' in human-like form.  Neural networks by themselves are incomplete...and incredibly wasteful if expected to do everything we need.

Meanwhile China's slower paced rollout makes more sense.  And it is said their systems are much more efficient.

Debunking Israeli Propaganda about the Nakba

Mouin Rabbani does a good job calling forth the key evidence showing that the enduring Israeli propaganda about the Palestinian Nakba is untrue.

https://x.com/MouinRabbani/status/2055846805787517213

First it was debunked by Erskine Barton Childers, who examined radio archives maintained by intelligence services which showed no radio broadcasts from Arab States ordering Palestinians to evacuate.  It would have been completely illogical for them to do so.  (The next link requires a one pound minimum subscription to read.)

https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/12th-may-1961/9/the-other-exodus

Israeli historian Benny Morris debunked similar claims regarding the 1967 war, showing that there was no preceding attack by Arab states.

In 1948, there was an attack by Arab states, but only months after Palestinian refugees had already begun accumulating in their countries.  This was certainly not an attempt to "genocide Jews," nor was it a unified attempt to dismantle Israel, which some countries had already established agreements with.  They each had different agendas, but they all wanted Palestinians to be returned to Palestine.

The X thread above also includes Israelis attempting to refute these and other points, wherein you can see some lively debate.

Norman Finkelstein also debunks the Israeli propaganda, referencing Childers and Morris, in his marvelous book Beyond Chutzpah.

Collapse of Civilizations

 https://youtu.be/yV-Cwcy8K6A?si=fCrGnvzu50cZwlD2

Where the title says "identical" what the video actually shows are repeated patterns, not precisely identical but similar.

This time *may* be different, in that there is something like a global civilization, that includes "outsiders."  But likely it is going to be the Western Imperium that collapses first, then disasters of global heating will ultimately cause all to collapse.

Mor On AI vs Jobs

AI proponents claim that the history of increasing automation and productivity is that they result in more jobs, not less.

I'm not going to argue with that in general, though clearly automation has at many times caused difficult or impossible job displacement that many people have struggled to deal with.  So, while in the long run there may be more jobs, in the short run many people lose theirs, and as Keynes famously quipped:

“In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”

But even if past automation has ultimately been in some ways beneficial  to most people (probably not to the natural environment including most other species, and even many people, but in terms of 'jobs' and obscene wealth for the wealthy with a bit for some others near the top) and is often felt to be that way overall, I'm also going to argue that AI is Different.  Surely that is also what AI proponents claim.

I just argued for this essential difference in my previous post.  Previous automation systems have dealt with the heavy, awful, boring, and repetitive work, not the creative and thinking parts which people like and benefit from doing.  I have also argued that the Limits to Growth mean there is not enough there for AI to achieve the better world proponents imagine, and instead we'll be left with a cruel and sloppy world with most people making do with less.  Finally it seems that AI related layoffs are already occurring, the only this is probably the only way--replacing most rather than augmenting people--that the vast investment and justify itself to investors.

Knowledge vs Slop

Knowledge and Symbolic Reasoning

When people gain useable insights into the operation of the universe, such as Einstein's law of Special Relativity, they have encoded those insights into "knowledge" which can be efficiently (if not completely) transmitted to other people, usually by explanation.

Generally this means that they have encoded insights into a reduced symbolic form, like E = MC^2.

When neural networks learn information, it is encoded into vast numbers of coefficients.  This form of knowledge cannot be efficiently transmitted to people, and it probably does not match symbolic concepts people already have.  So LLM's implicitly learn how different words are used, without necessarily learning or using our general categories such as noun and verb (which may be the most intuitive to us even if they present troubling exceptions to LLM's).

AI is making us dumber

Proponents of LLM believe this is fine.  They want AI to deliver solutions.  They don't need AI to explain itself.  They feel that it is unnecessary for AI to help us learn how to solve problems for ourselves.  We stand on the shoulders of AI to do more.

But if AI is letting us solve problems without fully understanding them, then it is making us dumber.  The "solutions" that we are thereby creating might best be understood as slop (the word popularized by Cory Doctorow, who is an excellent critic of AI).

When you are a homeless person passing through a soup kitchen, they dish out slop.  That's fine because they have limited resources and limited staff and that is the only way they can feed so many people cheaply.  But when you are an aristocrat dining in a fine restaurant, or just a person who has enough time to do so, you want a carefully prepared meal, not slop.

Slop is perhaps unavoidable, but generally it is something we should preferably avoid.  Ideally everyone should have carefully prepared meals.  That's part of a quality life.

Resisting AI means we will not achieve the (alleged) productivity benefits.

But preparing slop makes us dumber.  Preparing meals carefully makes us smarter.  In the long run, this is more important than being "more productive."  It is much better to do less, and to understand what we are doing and learn how to do it better, than just to "do more."

Consuming more slop makes us poorer, not richer.  (Don't trust GDP and similar metrics here.  What is really most important is not how much we consume, or how much money circulates, but deepening our quality of life.)

We should seek to invent the technologies which make us smarter, not dumber.  Only by being smarter can we know and appreciate quality and how to get there.

Therefore, we should seek to build the society that makes us learn more, think, and create, not just dish out more and more slop.

Making people dumber and dumber is the quickest road to collapse of everything.

That also happens to be what you get by mindlessly raising "productivity."

"Higher Level" thinking

Proponents of AI think the sloppiness is fine and it enables us to think at a "higher" (more abstract) level while the AI does the lower level thinking for us.

But this higher level often becomes little more than BS and hand waving.

It is my feeling and my belief that the strongest learning comes from working things all the way through.  This is not a new idea.  Euclid famously told King Ptolemy I: There is no royal road to Geometry.

So when I build my programs, I do it this way.  I think problems through with paper summaries or diagrams first.  I think about the different kinds of ways they could be solved, and choose what appears to be the best one.  If it proves to have been a wrong choice, I flip to another one before I have written much code, if possible.  I build everything from the raw ingredients of my operating system and programming language as much as possible.  Only if things appear to be particularly tricky do I look for previous solutions (aka libraries) that I can use.  If fairly easy, I even reimplement the parts of those libraries that I need.  I rely heavily on built-in language features or libraries including things like associative arrays (aka hashtables) which are capable of dealing with many if not most hard problems.

I know this goes against the grain.  From the very beginning of my 39 year career in computer programming I was taught the mantra "Reuse."  But I reject that as a general rule for many reasons:

1) Learn (everything) by doing (everything).

2) Programs built upon combinations of even fairly simple libraries can become ever more impossible to fully understand.  Often different libraries do not intuitively connect with one another.  Then all your code becomes translating information from one library to another--very dull.

3) Copyright, patent, and similar issues.

During the whole process, even before starting to code, I start writing the user documentation as well.  This is invaluable in determining the fine details of the interfaces.  If something is hard to describe, it's probably not designed well either.

I don't create a 'detailed design' such as including all variables and data structures before coding.  That's basically humanly impossible.  When I was required to use a formal design process, most people could not actually perform a useful Design Review to being well into the coding process if not nearly complete.  As one of my colorful (and PhD) colleagues remarked, "We're supposed to do Design after Coding.  I prefer design while coding."

For over a quarter century, I've either written the documentation into the program itself, or straight into fairly simple HTML.  I like being that close to the metal.  I hate word processing programs.  I do all my editing in Gnu Emacs.

I've had some experience doing things other ways.  Java programming, for example, is traditionally done with the importation of dozens or even hundreds of libraries, with interactions so complex that fancy tools are needed to work out the ramifications and keep each library installed at a compatible version and all the interfaces correct for that version.  General code does little more than call one library after another.  This is the pinnacle of the "Reuse" concept.  I hated it.  It wasn't programming in my opinion, it was dishing out slop.

AI is a vastly greater extension of this.

Now I am very happy to be able to search the web to find code to solve each unfamiliar issue as it comes up.  I don't just cut and paste the bits of found (or generated!) code.  I read them and figure out how they work.  Then I write them into my program.  (My post-retirement program MakePlaylist was created exactly as described above, except I haven't written HTML documentation for it, only in-line documentation that gets spit out into help messages and full documents by built in program options.  But now I am writing HTML for a far more challenging project: a multivolume book about my life.  I can view the result immediate, and also apply simple pre-processing editors I have in mind, along with CSS which I haven't much messed with before.)

DO WE REALLY NEED MORE PRODUCTIVITY ?

Capitalists, oligarchs, and their high priests known as Economists insist that all good things come from increasing productivity.  But they do not.  Increasing productivity may mean more income for them, but lower quality of life for all as everything becomes slop, prepared and consumed mindlessly.

Now old fashioned machines and even automation may be just fine, when they do the heavy lifting and boring routine tasks for us.

But the creative and thinking parts are not only the parts we most like doing, they are also the parts that make us better when we do them.

Now suppose you are a departmental manager responsible for several projects.  You could either have project manager staff for each project, or do them all yourself with AI.

Having a staff working on each project means you can have informed feedback about the practicality of each project.  Doing it all yourself means you don't get that essential feedback.  It is an error of pride to believe that you don't need that feedback from another person.  The end result is slop which lacks humanity and depth, the hallmarks of great art.

It reminds me of the music created by electronic and automated music generation pioneer Raymond Scott.  Scott invented machines to do things like sequencing, pioneering devices that became very useful to many musicians.  For that he should rightly be honored.  But he invented these machines so he wouldn't have to work with other musicians.  The result in his own subsequent life's work is very lively music which is also very shallow. 

The world we want to construct is one in which each person contributes what they are best doing, which is quite often what they like doing best or something adjacent to it.  Turning all jobs into dishing out slop is exactly the opposite.

What we want to do is the thinking and creative parts, and have machines do the heavy, awful, boring, and repetitive parts.  That's what previous automation has done.

And in many cases still and forever, the best machines are machines custom built for their purposes.

In both shirts and intellectual products, hand made is best and always has been.

And it makes us better to make such things, at least so much as we find our calling in doing so.

Limits to Growth

Creating the supercharged high value worlds where most everything is done by AI that people just command, and yet everyone has a job doing something more to their liking commanding that AI, can only be possible by large amounts of growth, the kind of growth nobody is planning for anymore anyway.  It seems more that people are simply being laid off rather than retrained for even more creative positions.

We need to scale back our assault on the environment, including especially our consumption of fossil fuels.  But even generating electricity the very best and most environmentally friendly ways, with wind and solar, still has considerable environmental impact.  We need to use as little electricity as possible.  As little of 'everything' as possible in fact, except our creative minds.

Instead, as everyone knows, data centers of obscene size are being built with obscene levels of consumption of water and electricity--which were going to be if not already scarce anyway, and scarcer still going forwards.

And that's not even counting the environmental cost of the 'value' AI may be adding to society, if it were keeping everyone employed at an ever higher level.  Im not counting that because it's unlikely.

Even just the Data Centers being built are only going to bring on the collapse of everything faster, let alone the vast future of data centers planned and/or approved.

The environmental cost is another problem that AI can't solve.  Though if it were intelligent and free thinking it would tell people not to build any more data centers for a while as part of the solution.

But Again, AI is Slop

Many have written on this, including Cory Doctorow, Ed Zitron, and Gary Marcus.  The latest debunking of AI competence in programming is in a recent update from Gary Marcus:

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/misplaced-panic-over-ai-progress

I have strong feelings about this.

Programming is not just about writing code.  I had a lifelong career in computer programming, and was once even taught (in some software engineering seminar sponsored by GE) that writing code was 10% of the job.  Most was in specification, design, and testing.

I see the most fundamental thing in programming as understanding people.  Hearing what they want and understanding what they mean.  Understanding the people around them too.  Seeing the Big Picture of where this is going to fit.

Then finding a close working approximation of what they mean.  It's a delicate balancing act, also taking into account time and institutional constraints too.

Then understanding the problem space of computer programming languages, algorithms, and related concepts.

An appreciation of beauty, elegance, readability, and simplicity.

Finally, a desire to create something good.

While it may seem mechanical, programming is more of an art than most

engineering and mathematics.  There are endless ways of doing the same thing,

more or less, but some are better, and all depending on circumstances.  At best programmers are driven not just to complete jobs, but do them well.

Israelis on Raping Prisoners

 Clip from Israeli talk show has one Israeli, speaking in English, calling the highly documented rapes of Palestinian prisoners (now finally reported in NYTimes) a "blood libel", while the other Israeli, speaking in Hebrew, saying the only problem is that rape is not the official regulated policy of the state, so the rapists don't fear prosecution.

https://x.com/muhammadshehad2/status/2054466066894422508

I have already published several debunkings of Israeli claims about October 7.  Grayzone has some of the best.  Here is another one:

https://www.trtworld.com/article/18165357

Debunking claims about the Hitler-Stalin Pact

 https://x.com/pawelwargan/status/2053755272724615386

"God" and Amelek

 It was not 'God' (a monotheistic concept) who commanded Saul to genocide the Amalekites, it was YHWH, the god of the Hebrews, who later became conflated with El as polytheistic Yahwism evolved towards monotheistic Judaism.  Any modern person who takes this command to genocide as an example of superior ethics and morality is seriously deluded.  Whether this actually happened, or things like it, or not, Hebrews got what was coming to them several times over in the following centuries, and there are few Hebrews practicing Yahwism today.*  The Torah of the Second Temple era, compiled during the Persian empire, demanded that only the Messiah could rebuild a state for the Jews, and this was re-iterated after the Bar Kokhba revolt in the Talmud Three Oaths.  Anyway, there is negligible evidence that the Amelekites even existed in Saul's time, let alone that Saul organized 200,000 soldiers to fight them.  The Agagites, the alleged descendants of Amelekites, were a rival group in Babylon who hoped to exterminate Jews because Mordecai wouldn't bow to Haman.  Negligible evidence of that too.

[Posted to this thread, doubtful it won't be censored.]

*Or perhaps, Zionism is the re-emergence of Yahwism, a tribal rather than universal religion.

Claims and counter-Claims about Immigrant Crimes

A priori, it seems reasonable to believe that immigrants are less likely to engage in crimes (other than "immigration crimes" of course, though most immigration "crimes" are "civil crimes") because it increases the risk they would get caught and deported.  OTOH, some seem to believe that illegals are more likely to engage in violent crime because (1) they already broke the law/rules of immigration, and (2) they are darker skinned people (etc).  Some of that perception seems to come from racism and bigotry.

That legal immigrants commit less crime than citizens is rarely disputed by those examining the data.  The only question is with illegal immigrants.

CATO has written many articles claiming that illegal immigrants commit less violent crime based on actual data from Texas.  (I'll link one below.)

Now, you may dismiss CATO as a hack right wing organization with an "open borders" agenda because that suits their corporate sponsors who want cheaper labor.  And quite often, I do dismiss CATO's conclusions, and many of their comments even in these articles.  But I believe they are presenting the actual crime data here, and their articles on crime are widely quoted in the mainstream news media.  MAGA who are even aware of CATO say they have "gone communist."  That is not what actual Communists think.  

It's not surprising mainstream media quotes the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) much less, because that's a lefty union related organization worried about worker conditions, but they reach the same conclusions as CATO on crime rates.

The people like CIS and others I have seen who claim to debunk CATO on immigration have just as much of an agenda, as you can often glean by looking at their other articles.  In 2024, CIS claimed to debunk a popular 2022 CATO study used by many media outlets.

https://cis.org/Richwine/Catos-Brazenly-False-Claim-About-Our-Illegal-Immigrant-Crime-Research

I can't seem to find any CATO study from 2022, but they published them almost every other year it seems, including 2018, 2024, and 2026:

2018

https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/criminal-immigrants-texas-illegal-immigrant

2024

https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-have-low-homicide-conviction-rate-setting-record-straight-illegal-immigrant

It might be interesting to look back at the CIS original research itself, rather than just their "debunkings" of CATO  Their original research looks as hacky, if not more, that that from CATO.

https://cis.org/Report/Misuse-Texas-Data-Understates-Illegal-Immigrant-Criminality

While CIS isclaiming CATO is fudging the numbers, guess what CIS is doing.  Fudging the numbers.  They are claiming illegal immigrant status is undercounted, but claim to have come up with a trick to handle it...the time required for greater convictions means a higher rate of correct identification in the most serious crimes.

https://cis.org/Report/Misuse-Texas-Data-Understates-Illegal-Immigrant-Criminalit

Which brings to my mind a problem with this whole category of studies.  What people are really interested in is not the rate of "convictions."  They are interested in the actual rate of crimes.  Now I believe it's virtually certain that illegal aliens have a higher convinction rate among those who actually did the crime.  They are much more likely to get caught because of racial bias and exposure, and more likely to get convicted because of lack of connections and representation compared with citizens, including being more likely to get falsely convicted.

Everyone knows by now most crimes are not even investigated, much less solved.  What happens is that people get caught in the "justice" system somehow, such as with an immigration violation, and then their prints and gun numbers can be run through the system.  Crimes without that kind of exposure never get solved.

Then of course well connected people can often get off, that too.  That would certainly affect the most serious crime convictions.  Everyone knows a good lawyer can get you off, but not so much a public defender.

All things considered, I believe the excess-conviction-rate-relative-to-citizens (ECRRC) is many times higher than 1, such as 3-20, dwarfing all the concerns of CIS and others (and, in fact, enabling their narrative)...

But then CIS numbers for the illegals in the most serious violent crimes also differ from everyone elses, including CATO and the NAS below.  So that's worthy of checking too.  It could be cherry picking somehow.

Possibly the most authoritative source we can have in USA is the National Academy of Sciences, which includes the most highly rated scientists in the USA, and all of their reports are peer reviewed.  And I can tell you because I've been in science that the NAS is politically diverse, it's not just "libruls."  Even academic science relies on scientific entrepreneurs who become Principal Investigators, they make a lot of money, and tend to be conservative, just like medical doctors.  And it's those "top" people who tend to get into NAS.  It's not just one party involved with appointing the people who appoint the funders of science either, and that determines who become the top Principal Investigators and who fall into other roles.

The NAS weighed in with a paper in 2020 showing that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117

Now, of course, they used a "model" to determine the number of illegals in any of the crime categories because of the incomplete identification problem described by CIS.  A model that was peer reviewed and available to public (as is the PDF of the original paper here).

That's the standard scientific approach, and they haven't seen fit to update that research.  I note that it was published during the first Trump administration, and scientists are well aware of such things.

That seems to be that's the best we know right now.

And the most respected mainstream media outlets like the NYTimes and WashingtonPost and all such follow it, with exceptions exceptions (perhaps quoting CIS) for FoxNews and the like.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/29/truth-about-illegal-immigration-crime/

They link to CATO, CIS, and NAS.

Still, it's a measure of convictions, not actual crimes, which I think are far more undercounted for the citizens. 

Pressing the Red or Blue buttons

 Mr McBeast says you should pus the Red Button, Never the Blue Button.

I don't think the answer is obvious.  You'd want to do a poll to see what other people think, or be part of the "Blue Button" movement to ensure 51%, rather than treat this as personal choice which could be a big mistake.  Or (defending the blue button choice) you don't want to live in a world where half of the people could be wiped out for pressing the wrong button.

I'm don't worry about solving such problems.  Real life versions of Prisoner's Life dilemmas are never so clear cut.  There are limitations, subtle effects, etc.

Thus it is with most electoral voting.  I recognize the Reason editors choice (never voting) as reasonable but I have a somewhat different take.

In addition to "the result" which one has only an astronomically small (at least 1 in a 10 million or maybe 1 in a quadrillion) chance of affecting, there are "subtle" effects (which may be very personally meaningful):

1) A greater or lesser margin of victory has significance which communicates to politicians and voters.

2) Similarly, a greater proportion of 3rd party voters (with no appreciable chance to win) or non-voters has significance.

3) Changes or rates of change of party choice has significance.

4) Whoever wins is likely to be bought by some part of the ruling class.  In no case is there going to be an end to excess profits or needless wars or general enshitification.

5) Talking about your choice could have some influence on others.

6) Talking about your choice makes you a greater or lesser part of the virtual club of people you know.

7) Expressing your real feelings makes you feel good.

8) Early collapse may be better than later collapse, etc.*  There might be more survivors from an earlier collapse, etc

9) Movement building solidarity if you are part of a movement.

10) Voting against your usual party communicates dissatisfaction.  If it leads to a loss, that is a form of "discipline" which might force the party to be better, or go down the tubes and be replaced by a better one.  (Or worse, etc)

I've decided that in view of everything else, #7 is central and most important.  There's never a good enough reason not to vote for the candidate you like more than others, or dislike least.  And IMO that's the way voting should be.  It's both saying what you feel, and communicating it, even if not through the singular "choice" of an allegedly "winner take all" system.

So the Reason editor should vote for (I'd assume) the Libertarian candidate, unless they though the Libertarian party was taking a bad turn recently, then they'd abstain.

They shouldn't not vote just because the Libertarian candidate won't likely win.  (Unless the cost of voting were a significant factor.). That's giving up an opportunity to say what you feel and be a comrade with your closest movement.

Also, the chance that you could still be persuaded is another power you have.  So it's never useful so say what you would never or always do.  So "I'll always vote for the Democrat" means the Democratic party has no need to improve and will just get worse as it surely gets bribed mostly that way.  "I'll never vote for the Democrat" also means the Democratic party has no need to improve.  Better to make it conditional and say something like "I'll vote for a Democrat when they oppose the genocide in Gaza (or perhaps even just call it genocide)."

*Collapse could mean many things.  Such as ecological collapse or dissolution of the USA.  In general we want to put catastrophes as far off into the future as possible, but we have no way of knowing whether that will actually be the best for most people (or animals, ET's, etc)