Yeah. But then those supporters will take an Uber/Taxi driven by an Ethiopian to a Mexican food restaurant owned and completely staffed by immigrants from Mexico and Central America and cheer with a black guy at the bar for their shared favorite sports team.

The whole malicious, hateful intent thing that seems really clear in internet arguments gets really muddy and confusing in practice in the real world. That is a part of the reason why I think the Holocaust comp is problematic. There was very real clear malicious intent there, and that matters.

Why do you think evolutionary psych arguments regarding attitudes towards immigrants should apply to one segment of the population only in certain circumstances? The problem with ev psych is that there is always something else that describes things better on an individual level.
I've always said how I think that makes up too much of your thinking. Applying that sort of stuff to politics is definitely a lot of E.O. Wilson's worst nightmare.

I like to think of myself as an equal opportunity amateur pop psychologist. If you think I am neglecting anyone, let me know and I will attempt to rectify things.

oh wow i didnt know prison kamps for kids even existed in america. they're almost becoming 1940's germany.

is the next step for the US just to gas them if theres no money for beds and toothpaste or clothes?

Seems like a perfectly fine shorthand to call the resultant action and policies of the Trump administration as part of Trump's personal affectations. It might not be strictly true, but people understand the shorthand. Likewise obviously Trump's base doesn't understand the particulars of every policy, but the Trump administration is there to translate those general sentiments into policy. So Trump supporters might not know the ins and outs of, say, asylum policy, but the Trump administration takes the general anti immigrant sentiment of his base and translates that into policies whose end result is less immigrants into the US.

I dunno, I heard Eichmann used to go out for empanadas at restaurants staffed by Argentineans.

So what then is your explanation for the inhumane conditions at the detainment centers?

DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak started with a 20 game hitting streak. But only about out of a million of the latter turn into the former.

Excellent point, Dave. I'll be sure to write to the Holocaust memorials that their "Never Again" sloganeering should be replaced with "Probably Not Again."

I agree that people's motivations, beliefs, attitudes, and so on are pretty complicated and it's not always useful to reduce them to some kind of one-dimensional caricature of evil. But at the same time it's also not always useful to downplay the very real salience of negative stereotypes and antipathy towards others, particularly while appealing to the idea of ethnocentrism as a universal. Ethnocentrism does tend to involve out-group bias and in-group preference.

I also don't think anyone believes that the current state of affairs is literally identical to the Holocaust. The concern is that some of what is happening is pretty reminiscent to the events that led towards the Holocaust. Atrocities don't happen overnight or without antecedents. I've never studied the Holocaust specifically, or the buildup of Nazi Germany, but for me personally I also think about some of what I've read on sanctioned massacres like My Lai, and how the diffusion of responsibility, the bureaucratic routinization of problematic behavior, the tendency to dehumanize (and so on) contribute to these sorts of things. I don't think the comparisons are beyond the pale, even if they require qualification. But I've said before I care more about what's happening and what we should do about it than what it's called, so I'd rather not get too bogged down in semantics.

You don't have to have malicious intent for an indifference towards human life to have disastrous consequences.

Nobody would ask that you maintain a standard consistent with a middle class lifestyle but complete indifference implies....? Do you let them starve? I doubt many would argue for that, because most people accept there being a minimum duty of care because they're NOT indifferent.

If you were, your indifference would lead you to policies that are pretty much are consistent with actual Nazi death camps. That isn't hyperbole. If you were ACTUALLY indifferent you wouldn't spend anything to feed people except when sustaining their life allows them to be productive. It's exactly that kind of indifference that lead to what happened in ww2 concentration camps - you don't need to be malicious to go down that path.

And whether or not you think trump actually is a racist you'd have to be oblivious to doubt whether some of the people being appointed to manage these things are carrying those sentiments. and these attitudes are a very convenient justification to continually lower the bar in terms of duty of care.

How low does the bar have to be before drawing comparisons to pre ww2 concentration camps isn't even hyperbolic?

The semantics help put it into perspective to people who are numb to it because of how disconnected their lives are to the reality on the ground. It is a valid comparison even if it's not perfectly analogous. And i think deconstructing the ways in which it's similar/dissimilar is probably enough to make more people start caring where they'd otherwise just shrug it off.

It's hard to say that actively advocating for, voting for, and then supporting an administration that makes it harder to come to the US, reduce the total number that could come to the US, and actively tries to deport as many as possible as indifference, at least to the extent that people do that.

Of course it can be indifference. Awarding American citizenship is a gift to people who wouldn't otherwise qualify, and the immigration process is built around whether people will be net assets.... and the vast majority of people in the world (including americans) are not. The VAST majority are net recipients of citizenship.

I don't even think the government has have a moral obligation to take in refugees from all around the world. There're more efficient ways to help people in terms of foreign aid and economic development. But when they do slip through, there is a moral obligation to provide some duty of care before you figure out what to do with them unless you ARE actually indifferent.

Lack of empathy fueled in part by identity politics, and perhaps more importantly, at the governmental level divisive political infighting that makes legislative change extremely difficult.

A common argument I get into the with leftists on this forum is they think the extreme moralizing/demonizing and divisiveness is a good thing. Mr. Wookie especially is a big proponent idea of this concept that one should brook no compromise with those we deem morally deficient, and divisiveness should be exercised to the fullest extent at all times. Unfortunately, at the ground level a consequence of all this divisiveness is it is very hard for reasonable people to actually make things better, especially at the governmental/legislative level.

In the immortal words of the Captain from Cool Hand Luke which was popularized in the intro to the Guns and Roses song Civil War: "What we have here is failure to communicate"

People on the left and right respectively cheer and applause when AOC and Trump ramp up the divisive rhetoric, and cheer when politicians "on the other team" can't go to restaurants in Washington DC without being heckled and run out, and then are confused and astounded when we have legislative gridlock, and can't move forward with something straightforward and necessary as improving asylum living conditions.

I know you guys all think Joe Biden is the devil reincarnated. But guess what, that is what politicians like him do (in theory at least). They sit down with the "bad guys" on the other team and actually get useful policy passed. Which is kind of how democratic representative politics is supposed to work.

Sending out multiple tweets/day vilifying the other side, and ramping up the divisiveness is an example of how democratic representative politics doesn't work.

OK, but this thread is about immigrants being detained under inhumane conditions. I feel like you're venturing a bit far afield? That's not necessarily a big problem or anything, but what you're talking about feels more like a conversation for the identity politics thread, or the one about extreme partisanship

AOC will work with the other side when and if the opportunity presents itself. So will pretty much everyone because it's obviously a good thing to always be open to.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/...d-cruz-1365858
Quite possibly nothing will come of it but you have to keep trying.


On the other hand I've been reading a little bit about the funding issue and (with the caveat of very limited knowledge on my part) I think AOC is dead right to oppose giving ICE another dime.

My understanding is there have been, and currently are, legislation meant to address the inhumane living conditions at the border, but they are being held up by partisan gridlock, especially between the House and Senate, and that is even before we get to the problem of dealing with Trump. So at least as far as that goes, it seems germane to the topic.

Kelhus, the most important part of the inhumane treatment, the family separation, is not about laws and gridlock, its about a choice by the trump admin.


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/u...ion-obama.html

On the one hand, we have people torturing innocent children. On the other hand, we have people saying mean things about that that hurt your feelings. So really, both sides are equally at fault for the torturing of children, because the liberals don't seem to want to tolerate a little light torture as an improvement on the torture being wrought now, even when the first side has the absolute authority to end all the torture right now.

**** off with this bull****.

Thats all fine and good. But attitudes like this are pretty incompatible with American representative democracy, or really democratic government at all. Maybe you are in the camp that the system is so corrupt it should be burned down and a moralizing authoritarian regime should be instituted instead. Which is fine. Given what is going on here and in Western European democracies, maybe that is how this all will play out. Maybe it is even inevitable.

Man, maybe you're on to something. Maybe you should go back in time and tell MLK that the best way to effect change is to not piss anyone off on the other side, to always compromise when it comes to basic human rights, and to just not be so gosh darn polarizing. Because when you're polarizing, you force people to choose between civil rights and inequality, or between torturing children or not doing that, and that just really makes some people uncomfortable, because they like a lot of things about the abusers and the torturers, and they may even like the abuse and the torture, but when you keep shoving it in their faces and using controversial language, it's just so unsettling. Their identities are all tied up in being on Team Torture, and when you make Torture look so ugly, they just don't know what to do with themselves. After all, as a student of history myself, everyone knows that MLK just gave one great speech, and then blammo, civil rights. That's how it works in the land of Civil Discourse and in the Marketplace of Ideas.

Kelhus is definitely the OPPONENT of authoritarian regimes in this here thread.

The Gestapo spent all day every day seeking out Jews to talk to and yet you expect me to believe there's malice in their hearts?

No you are wrong. Extreme attitude from the Repubs and the Dems willingness to compromise got us here.

Bend to far and you already broke - lt. Daniels

When we get to tortured children and separated families there is no compromise.