Thread by @asymmetricinfo

I just wrote the most delightful column on Section 11042 of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. I can't wait for you all to read it.

Alas, it will probably go up tomorrow. I'm sorry to tease you that way, but you're just going to have to wait, with your delicious anticipation building every moment. It will make you enjoy it all the more when it is finally--finally!--available for your eager delectation.

And on that happy note, let's tweetstorm the heck out of my most recent column, on Trump's use of the word "Animals". washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump…

As always, I will NOT be telling you what's in the column, other than that it discusses whether this is racially coded language about immigrants. For that, you'll have to read the column. I'm answering the questions people asked me after they read it.

Also their angrier comments. Up first: "It's wrong to call MS-13 animals, because unlike MS-13, animals don't kill for pleasure".

Answer: I am guessing you haven't watched a cat play with a mouse. Or read about the things primates like to do to each other when they get mad. Or listened to a poultry farmer talk about their prevention strategies for chicken murder & cannibalism.

Also, this, h/t @GabrielRossman: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_k…

Angry Comment, the Second: "You say that immigrants actually commit less crime than the native born. You're missing the point, which is that the number of illegal immigrants here should be zero, and we shouldn't let in *any* criminal immigrants!"

Answer: This is certainly a widely-held statement. But it's actually not right. I mean, as a statement of principal--we should want not to admit criminals to our country, or have people here in violation of our law--it's fine. But not as a practical guide.

Lest you think I'm trying to sneakily create a back-door open-borders policy by refusing to do border enforcement, let me say, I think we should have higher legal immigration, but also think that whatever the level of legal immigration allowed, we should enforce i vigorously.

But the optimal amount of lawbreaking for a society to tolerate is never zero. And this applies beyond immigration. The optimal amount of crime is not "none". The optimal amount of expense account cheating is not "none". The optimal amount of toner theft is not "none".

Those are the most *desirable* amounts of law-making. But unless they occur spontaneously, without any enforcement, not the optimal amount. Because enforcement is costly to everyone else.

To use a very extreme example: we could get very close to zero violent crime in Americat by locking up every male between the ages of 14 and 45 in solitary confinement. Yet we should not do that! That is a wildly more costly "solution" than the (quite real) problem it solves.

To take a much more benign example: institutions that attempt to ensure there is no expense account fraud by wasting enormous amounts of labor painfully verifying every transaction, no matter how small.

You save a ton of money in expenses this way, not least because many employees will pocket small expenses rather than going through the insanity of filing for them.

Only valuable man-hours that could have been spent thrilling your customers or streamlining costs instead get poured into proving that you did, so, actually take a round-trip subway ride to visit a vendor.

This saps morale, and causes your best employees to depart for somewhere that they don't have to provide an affidavit every time they tip the coat-check girl at a client dinner.

How does this apply to immigration? Border patrol agents are expensive. Also hard to hire, because the corruption potential is obviously quite high, which means you have to screen out anyone with even small financial difficulties, or say, a history of using drugs.

Those agents require oversight, another managerial task, which gets exponentially more complicated as operation scale increases. (Which is why the military is the worst of all the federal bureaucracies--although also, surprisingly good given its sheer size).

Operations also become more intrusive, shutting down actual productive things Americans are doing. Just ask employers who lose production proving that legal workers are, in fact, legal. Or ranchers operating on the southern US border.

Like most things, early gains in enforcement are large, then decline as you pick low-hanging fruit. Each marginal gain requires more and more resources, until you're spending more than the problem could possibly warrant. So no, we will never get to literally zero, and shouldn't

On the legal immigration side, how are you going to identify the criminals so that literally none of them ever make it into the US? Do you think they all have face tattoos? Some people will slip by a reasonable level of background scrutiny.

And for reasons stated above, we shouldn't step up to "unreasonable levels of background scrutiny" to compensate. Some will become criminals after they arrive here. People are complicated. Life is difficult.

Next: "You liar! It was *obvious* that Trump was talking about MS-13."

Answer: Yes, he was probably talking about MS-13. But for the reasons I stated in the column, that doesn't mean it wasn't a coded attack on immigrants. For more, re-read the column: washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump…

"You liar! Why won't you just admit that Trump is a white nationalist? After all, he said that white nationalists were "fine people".

Actually, he didn't say that. In the press conference to which you refer, he condemned white nationalists and neo nazis. Twice.

Is Trump a white nationalist? I can't peer into his heart of hearts. But I doubt it. I think he's just not very empathetic to the problems of people who aren't like him, and willing to pander to people who are white nationalists if that gains him some political advantage.

Is pandering to white nationalism whenever you can get away with it better than *being* one? Well, on the plus side, you're not a white nationalist. On the down side, they actually believe their delusional ideology. You don't, and you're willing to encourage it anyway.

So ultimately, I don't think arguments about whether Trump's a racist or a white nationalist are very fruitful. What we can see him doing is bad enough. We don't need to spend a lot of time speculating about the unprovable.

Next: "You complain that the left focuses on the alt-right and neo-nazis, even though they're small in number. But they *are* the conservative movement now."

Answer: No. these are tiny groups. web.archive.org/web/2018010713…

They get huge amounts of attention, because the alt-right is really noisy online, and because we think they're especially terrible, so we pay close attention whenever they do anything.

Do not confuse "frequency of articles and tweets about them" with "actual size and influence". Those are two very, very different things. They're not even close proxies for each other.

Thinking otherwise is a result of a couple of well-known cognitive bias called "selection bias" and "the availability heuristic"

"But there's a white nationalist in the White House". See above in re whether Trump is a white nationalist. But most Trump voters are not white nationalists. They just don't care as much as you do that he panders to white nationalists.

And before you say "that's a distinction without a difference": no, it's not. White nationalism is a specific thing. It is not simply a synonym for "very bad people" or "people I dislike".

Many very bad people are not, by any stretch of the imagination, white nationalists. More, in fact, then there are actual white nationalists, who are again part of a specific movement with a specific agenda, not just anyone you consider insufficiently enlightened on racial issues

I'm not, to be clear, arguing that it's *okay* that Trump talks like he talks, or goes as far as he dares to make white nationalists like him. That doesn't mean white nationalists are running the country.

If you label "wanting somewhat less immigration, and talking in coded, insensitive ways about immigrants" as "a white nationalist running the country", what do you say if someone actually runs on a race war platform? Don't destroy useful descriptors for evanescent political gain

And last: "How dare you equate what Trump said with what liberals say about conservatism?"

Answer: I didn't equate them. In fact, I said Trump was worse. What you're mad about is that I juxtaposed them at all. And why did I do that? Because I was trying to persuade conservatives

I do not need to write a column for you, progressive reader, to explain that what Trump said was bad. You already know it's bad! You've been yelling about it on twitter and in comment sections all week.

The people I was trying to reach were conservative readers who thought that the left was deliberately feigning strategic deafness for evanescent political advantage.

To try to reach them, I pointed out that it's not simply disingenuous to read unstated messages in choices about who you focus on in a larger group, and how you talk about them. And that indeed, they correctly see just such messages when liberals do this to them.

Which is a good guide to people who get angry at my "false equivalence" column: if you're angry, consider that maybe, I'm not trying to persuade you, but to persuade someone else, who needs to see my point put in a context that's emotionally salient to them.

There's often a direct tradeoff there: the meaner I am about Trump, the less liberal readers yell, and the more conservative readers do. It's a balancing act, and sometimes I anger one side more than the other. Because I want to talk to both sides.

Anyway, you can read the column here, and please do. washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump…