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I'm nearly certain he is aware of these points, but there are certain topics he is unwilling to broach in public. He is still a professor at a public university, and tenure doesn't protect you much from student activists choosing to make your life hell.
Your descriptions of Caplan just don't ring true to me. I don't think you've really read much of his stuff. Which is fine by itself, I don't really read very widely of critics or even people on my own side. But I also don't make claims about those people or what they are saying.
And yes I do tend to nail down specific claims and hammer on them. Otherwise I face a gish gallop of arguments and none of them ever get resolved. I took your weakest argument and probed it to see how wedded you are to your ideas. Some responses might have indicated we could have a productive discussion. Not the ones you gave me. Next item would have been doing some research and finding out if caplan had actively written about the arguments you claim he had never heard of. I got ahead of myself and already looked. He has written about them, but I already got the sense of where the conversation would go from your earlier responses, you'd just pivot to different claims, or say he wasn't specific enough.
It's hard for me to address your claims when you keep the intentionally vague.
As an example, you say that my descriptions of Caplan don't ring true. You don't say which ones, but one of them was obviously true: That the environment Caplan inhabits purposefully prohibits certain things from being discussed.
My problem here is that earlier in this comment chain you rested one of your claims on the fact that Caplan has done a lot of work within this gestapo environment to be a point in his favor. This irks me a bit, since instead of arguing against an actual argument I made relating to the fact that a person purposefully inhabiting such a stifling environment and that the work produced within is not 'serious', you ignore it.
Related to that, you assert I am not familiar with Caplan and his work. Insinuating that my lack of familiarity is a point against me. But by the same token, you assert that Caplan could probably not address these points publicly, given the environment mentioned above. So how could my alleged unfamiliarity with Caplan be of any relevance?
My description of Caplan was that he has not engaged with population group differences within the US and the lackluster result of immigration into the EU when it comes to his assertions. I, as a consequence, said he is not a serious person. I am, given all of this, at a loss as to how my descriptions are not true.
To top it all off: You, despite having allegedly far greater knowledge of his work, don't point to where he addresses these contentions. Instead you just spend one too many a comment floating the possibility that he has. Well, you now say he has written about them, but you're just not telling. OK man.
I think the word choice of "serious" sucks. Most people would consider it to mean the opposite.
Like if a historian doesn't address all the claims of Holocaust deniers you'd say they aren't "serious" about history.
Whereas most people would say that engaging with them at all is a sign of not being serious.
I've been responding to you on mobile in my spare time. I don't have the article with me. Caplan talks about Emil Kierkegaard, and his disagreements on immigration. It's a blog post. I think from two or three years ago.
If I had rested any of my arguments on the fact that Caplan is not serious then I'd whole heartedly agree. But I didn't. Much less so considering I am talking to you on a rather heterodox platform. To that end I do not understand what relevance the opinion of 'most people' has to do with anything. Much less so considering most people would say that advocating for an open borders policy is a sign of someone not being serious.
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