Not long ago, I mentioned that I thrive on debate. More recently, this was thrown in my face as evidence that I like starting shit. Whether the accusation is true or not, I find the evidence questionable, but only because I don’t believe that debate is a bad thing.

There are, in my mind, three levels of influential discussion. Debate, argument, and fighting. I prefer debate, and I try to avoid fighting altogether. I don’t care if someone else changes their opinion to match mine, but I don’t like being pressured to accept someone else’s opinion in favor of my own. That is why I prefer debate.

There is no winner in a true debate. That competitive argument is called debate seems ironic to me, since, in it’s purest form, debate is merely an exchange of viewpoints and the facts that support them. If I point out that Adam Smith, the father of Free-market economics was not a laissez-faire capitalist, I am not trying to sway you from your socialist stance. I’m simply supporting my view that some government interference in the economy is acceptable, as long as that interference is limited and performs the government’s primary purpose of protection from abuse.

In debate, it’s okay to agree to disagree. That is, in fact, the most likely outcome. The minute you enter a debate with the intention that you are going to change someone’s mind, it stops being a debate and becomes an argument. Arguments are laden with words of judgment. Socialism is wrong. Capitalism is unfair. Everything about an argument suggests that the other person is committing an error in holding their beliefs and opinions. Facts that don’t support your position are glossed over or ignored in favor of those that do. Conclusions are drawn that are not necessarily the result of the facts used to support them. If you state that corporate culture and power in the US is proof that capitalism doesn’t work, then you are arguing, because you are ignoring the fact that modern corporate culture stands more as an argument for more stringent enforcement of anti-trust laws than it does for further muddying of the waters separating business and the government.

Most discussions end up as arguments, because it’s hard to fathom the idea that someone, given your store of information, might draw different conclusions. In many ways, human society has out-evolved human brains, and we’re still monkeys trying to convince the other members of our troop that “fire good” or “fire bad” depending on which end of the stick we picked up. The problem arises in that many arguments devolve into nothing more than fights. You can tell you’re in a fight if you find yourself resorting to a lot of argumentative fallacies.

Mind you, I tend to have an open attitude toward such tools of argument. For one thing, the classes of argument referred to as fallacies are only fallacies under certain circumstances, and are perfectly reasonable arguments under others. If a man states that he is against abortion, it is a tu quoque fallacy to point out that one of the group funds that his mutual invests in has money in a business that experiments with fetal stem cells. It is not a tu quoque fallacy to point out that a man who loudly decries homosexuality was caught soliciting blowjobs in a bus station.

So maybe avoiding fallacy isn’t the best way to avoid devolving into a fight. Maybe the difference really lies in the lack of respect shown to the other person. If you find yourself getting emotionally involved in the other person’s failure to adopt your viewpoint, you’re probably in a fight. If you find yourself using abusive language, or threats, to impose your view on someone else, you’re almost certainly fighting. If you deride someone’s viewpoint for no other reason than that it differs from you’re own, not only are you fighting, but you’re also a bully. You need to stop that shit.

I love debate. I can trade facts and opinions for hours, and even days, and I get great joy from the things I learn in the process, whether anyone changes their mind or not. I’m okay with argument. I’m not really comfortable trying to make others change their stance, but, as long as everyone is civil, some learning can be achieved. I try not to fight, and I regret every time I was drawn into one. While I’ve often come away from debates thinking, “Wow, I never knew that.” I have never come away from a fight with anything useful, and I usually come away angry or frustrated.

Let’s all try to debate more and fight less.

Hey, remember a week and a half ago when the President announced that he was going to direct ICE to ignore the law (and half of their reason for existence). Yeah, that’s still a thing. I’m not going to debate whether an elected official directing his subordinates to ignore the law is illegal (it is–there’s no debate on the subject–it’s called obstruction of justice). I don’t mind debating the Illegal Immigration issue, but we all have to admit to a few facts or it becomes a big clusterfuck.

The vast majority of migrant farm workers are American Citizens. I know it’s hard to believe, because it’s been drilled into us for years that our low-cost food and other products is the result of farms paying scut wages to poor immigrants because their undocumented and have no power. Except that’s the opposite of true, Farming is the most protected industry in the US, and one of its protections is that farmers are exempt from a wide range of payroll and OSHA laws and regulations. How do they find American citizens willing to put up with that? It turns out that whole hordes of people will do whatever it takes to not starve.

The Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t guarantee a child the right to stay in the US if his or her parents are foreign nationals. The relevant clause of the 14th Amendment, the one that declares any person born in the US or its legal territories to be a citizen of the United States says nothing about that person having a right to grow up in the United States. The fact is, there is a wealth of rights that are reserved until a person reaches adulthood. This “anchor-baby” notion does nothing for anyone except encouraging stupid people to take ridiculous risks during the most fragile period of an adult woman’s life (at least until she reaches seniority).

There is not a flood of anchor babies being squirted out for Free Welfare Cash. Anchor babies exist, but they aren’t an epidemic. Of the few that do exist, if their parents had any idea of the lifelong shitfest their children would have to endure, they wouldn’t bother trying this law-hack. Speaking as the child of two natural-born Americans, born on a US military reservation on a spoils-of-war territory, I can honestly say that every encounter I’ve had with the Federal bureaucracy started with me being asked for my green card and ended with me showing my consular birth certificate to a supervisor while explaining the laws that make me a natural-born American citizen while writing “Okinawa” as my place of birth.

No one is against immigration. The question at hand is the treatment of illegal immigrants. That is to say, people who have entered the country illegally, are staying here illegally and are probably breaking a few related laws to do so. This is close to my heart because my wife is a legal immigrant, and every time they “reform” the laws to make it easier to be an illegal, they make it harder and more expensive for us to maintain her legal status.

Coyotes are filthy criminal assholes, and no matter what is ultimately decided about the immigrants themselves, the coyotes, regardless of race or nationality, should be punished in some way that better people than me can devise, because everything I can think of as suitable violates the 6th Amendment. Seriously, the nicest thing I can think to do to them would be to banish them to one of the Aleutians with a pen knife and a bottle of Deja Blue.

I have no conclusion, and there are a lot of facts that are misinterpreted or just ignored, but these are the ones that I can’t ignore.

The 2014 general election is over. I assume that all of the candidates got votes of some sort, and one of them got more than the others. It doesn’t matter who beat who; what matters is that it’s over. Now it’s time to buckle down and do some work,

Here’s a kitten to get us started.

No matter who you are or what you believe, one thing is very clear. We have allowed our country to stray from the path. We’re in the woods and following wills-o-the-wisp isn’t going to get us anywhere. We need to sit down and have a serious discussion about where we are, how we got here, and how we get back to someplace we want to be. There’s no Blair Witch in these woods; the only danger we’re in is from our own stupid, so let’s just work on that, shall we?

The first stage in any discussion, debate, or negotiation is for all parties to know what they want and what they’ll settle for, so here’s my wish list for the 113th US Congress.

Fix the Affordable Healthcare Act

Honestly, I don’t care if Obamacare is “repealed, root and branch,” or not. I just know it’s broken and needs to be fixed. Provisions that should have been included were not, and there was some dumbass shit added that should be removed. Here’s my short list.

The individual mandate needs to go. I’m all for offering a tax deduction to help those who can’t afford basic insurance, but penalizing those who don’t want it is stupid. It’s also stupid to penalize those who can afford better than basic.

While we’re on the subject of basic insurance, let’s all try to agree that basic healthcare does not include any elective treatments. No boob jobs, no boner pills, and no birth control that isn’t related to the immediate health of the mother. You can buy a rider for that if you want to, but it should not be required basic service.

If we’re going to throw a big bag of money into the industry by public fiat, we have to limit who can grab the bag and how much they can grab. This shit where a single hospital stay can net a patient 30 different bills from 20 different “companies” has got to stop. There should be one bill for one procedure, and it should be fully discussed with the relevant parties before anyone starts sharpening a scalpel.

By that same token, drug companies should not be allowed to advertise prescription medication on television. If you think there’s something wrong with you, by all means, see a doctor, but there is no point at which it is okay for a drug company to convince you to harangue your doctor into prescribing their medication.

Repeal the USA Patriot Act

Seriously. Just dump that shit.

We don’t know what we were thinking.

Dissolve the Department of Homeland Security

And return the component bureaus to their original homes. INS (or whatever they’re calling it now) should be part of State. Customs should be part of Commerce. The Coast Guard is a goddamned part of our military and should be part of the DoD like the rest of our military. We don’t need a Department of Violating Every Idea On Which Our Nation Was Founded, and creating it was a bad idea in the first place. Lets dump it.

Reinstate Glass-Steagall

Or something like it. Whether Fannie Mae and the Community Reinvestment Act contributed to the crash of 2007 is open to debate. What isn’t is that it never would have happened if Glass-Steagall (the law that separated banking institutions from less reliable investment entities) hadn’t been repealed in 1996. As long as people who treat other people’s lives as a commodity are allowed access to our savings, our savings will be at risk of another catastrophe.

Enforce our Anti-Trust Laws

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again (and again and again until someone finally listens) “Too big to fail is too big to exist!” There are too many industries dominated by too few companies. The thing is, they are all essential industries. Telecommunications, food production, fuel and energy production, name a national industry. Now name more than five companies in that industry. that needs to be fixed.

End “Free Trade” that isn’t Fair Trade

We have a trade deficit. More money leaves our country than comes in. Shouldn’t we seek some sort of balance?

And finally,

Fix Immigration

No, that doesn’t mean provide amnesty for the million or so illegal immigrants currently living in our country. Since 1985, we’ve done nothing but make it easier to be an illegal while making it more difficult and harrowing for people to immigrate legally. We need to end the by-region immigration quotas and replace it with a first-come policy. I also think favored-professions should go, because who the hell are we to bleed a developing nation of their best and brightest?

And we need to make the punishments for employing illegal immigrants more severe. Get caught employing undocumented labor and you shouldn’t have to pay a small fine, you should have to pay the difference between what you paid the immigrant(s) and what you would pay a legal resident. then you should submit to regular inspections to show that you learned your lesson. Because breaking the law has consequences, and one of those consequences is that you have to prove you can be trusted not to do it again.

That’s my list. You have to register to leave a comment. I’ll keep an eye out for new registrations. E-mail me at bhainley(“at” symbol)casualnotice(period)com or message me on Facebook for expedited registration.