John,

Think about all the murder we could prevent if we banned pregnancy. If no one was ever born the murder rate would eventually become 0.

In fact immigrants commit fewer crimes on average than natural born citizens so by bringing in more immigrants you get fewer murders on average per head of population. I'm sure finding out facts will change your opinion because its so fact based and not a reverse engineered response to an emotional reaction.

This post is just intellectually dishonest. Over the top, hyperbole.

Anyway, in the real world.


House Passes Emergency Aid at the Border

Quote:

“The Senate has a good bill. Our bill is much better,” Pelosi, D-Calif., told her Democratic colleagues in a meeting Tuesday morning, according to a senior Democratic aide who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the private session.

“We are ensuring that children have food, clothing, sanitary items, shelter and medical care. We are providing access to legal assistance. And we are protecting families because families belong together,” Pelosi said in a subsequent floor speech.

The bill contains more than $1 billion to shelter and feed migrants detained by the border patrol and almost $3 billion to care for unaccompanied migrant children who are turned over the Department of Health and Human Services. It seeks to mandate improved standards of care at HHS “influx shelters” that house children waiting to be placed with sponsors such as family members in the U.S.

Both House and Senate bills ensure funding could not be shifted to Trump’s border wall and would block information on sponsors of immigrant children from being used to deport them. Trump would be denied additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds.

Bold added for emphasis

(Yes, I know this is off topic and is going to need to be moved with the rest of it. Apologies.)

Yeah. Diamond talked about this. They are only doing this because it is absolutely necessary due to their demographics. Not because of any moral compulsion. And I didn't see anything about asylum in that article.

But I am guessing the average Japanese person might be morally repulsed by our seemingly complete disregard for our own homeless population; and they may even see this as a warning of what might happen if they allow their social order and cohesiveness to break down the ways ours has.

Speaking of cognitive dissonance, we haven't even gotten to the part where some of the people in this thread getting outraged about what is going on 1,000 miles away actually live in the same locale as hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people living in true Holocaust level abject poverty, and yet they are able to compartmentalize this and not get too outraged at themselves and their elected officials for this.

But yeah, the relativism point is well made though. It always strikes me as a little absurd some of the outrage (mainly from the left) of how US immigration policy is so demonic and evil, and they conveniently ignore the part that in certain aspects it is much more humane than pretty much every other country in the world, even other first world nations, eg. birthright citizenship and emphasis on allowing families to rejoin. Not surprising, these are two positions the real far right is extremely critical of.

This is bull****, too. Liberals do care about homelessness, and they do get outraged at elected officials. The people you are supporting are the ones who don't want to do anything about homelessness. It's not impossible to oppose two injustices, and I don't believe your concern for homelessness is sincere, outside of being a blunt weapon to attack liberals, which is your raison d'etre.

If Japan jumped off a bridge, should the US jump off one too?

Also, LOL at calling people like AOC, Fly, and Wookie 'extreme leftists' just because they say things that are accurate.


This is really the crux of the problem with modern political discourse btw. The right wing for the most parts says things that are flatly untrue and when a person calls them out on that they are immediately labeled a 'leftist'.

the same ppl that are outraged by the treatment of these innocent ppl and children are also advocates for the homeless.

but thats not even why your argument is redic. why do we need to solve homelessness before we can stop caging and tortuing children?

The kids at the border are not illegal immigrants though. They're legal ones.

So yeah, perhaps you clicked on the wrong thread?

I haven't said or implied otherwise.

OK, should we ramp up abortions so that we don't have native born people murdered by other native born people who otherwise wouldn't have been murdered if the murderer were instead aborted?

(Again, I acknowledge another derail)
So if I go to a clean IP and browse your forum I will expect to find vibrant threads of outraged liberals voicing concern for the homelessness crisis?

From what I can tell, most of the outrage going on right now is very ideologically driven, on both the right and the left. It is absolutely amazing the level of cognitive dissonance on display that it is so easy to see when the other side is doing it, but everyone is so blind to their own biases.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ry-cities.html

For example, Daily Mail posted this article about some heinous crimes committed by illegal aliens who were let back into community instead of being turned over to ICE. I am sure if I went to some right wing forum there is a lot of moral outrage over this, but if I went to your forum it is probably not even mentioned at all, and if it is the responses are a lot more sanguine.

And when it comes to articles about police brutality it is the exact same opposite response. Over and over and over. All the outrage is so obviously ideologically driven, and everyone is so blind to it. It is truly an amazing thing to behold.

Is Japan evil? I mean Japan badly needs immigrant labor. It is a national emergency. And there are millions of potential asylum seekers who could do exactly this. And yet Japan isn't interested at all. No thank you.

I like how everyone is completely avoiding answering this simple yes-no question, because it would force them to acknowledge their own cognitive dissonance and the arbitrary and capricious nature of their morality.

Again, not sure why homelessness is being discussed in a thread about migrant concentration camps, but just so you're clear on the differences: Homelessness is a very complex systematic problem that is very difficult to address. Further most efforts to address it are met with by extreme resistance from right wing politicians.

On the other hand we have the migrant camps, where the problem is one entirely of the current administration's own making. There was an effective program that was working well, and as has been shown they ended it because it didn't accomplish their political goal of being 'tough on the border'. So it's also a situation that could be ended in hours, or at best days, and best of all at no cost, just by a signature on a piece of paper and a few phone calls.

But they won't do it.

It's not the US immigration laws that are inhumane and evil, it's the fact that the Trump administration is deliberately circumventing or outright ignoring those laws to implement a strategy that is deliberately cruel and inhumane.

Our hypocrisy is limited only by your imagination.

That said, outrage being ideologically driven is, like, the most boring observation in the world? Liberals and conservatives getting upset over different thins is, like, what makes people liberals or conservatives. Why do you think you're some transcendent visionary for noting that, and why am I somehow blind when I just don't consider it a serious problem that undocumented people here who commit crimes do their time just like a native born person would instead of also getting deported for it?

I don't think Japan is evil for having restrictive immigration policies, per se, but I think you're conflating separate issues. If Japan starts putting children in camps like the ones we're putting children in then that would be evil, in my view. But in the OP I tried to distinguish the moral objection to the detention policies specifically from larger questions about immigration policy. Even in the context of a very restrictive immigration policy there's still an obligation to respect the basic humanity of people you detain or deport.

You talk about cognitive dissonance, and while I generally try to avoid speculating on the psychological motivations of people I've arguing with, it seems to me that there is also a certain amount of cognitive dissonance involved with efforts to shift the conversation from the specific question about the conditions in which people are being held to other tangentially related topics, whether it be allegations of liberal hypocrisy, moral relativism, crime committed by immigrants, or whatever.

So I'm certainly prepared to agree that people on the left can have all sorts of flaws or inconsistencies in their thinking, and that there are all sorts of other morally troubling things going on in the world besides our detention policies. The answer, for a lot of "what about X?" questions is indeed "X is also a problem." But I still don't see why that should preclude raising a stink about this particular issue, especially when (and I keep saying it) it seems like protesting this issue loudly right now might actually help to fix this problem. The world will still suck, but maybe we can make it suck a little less?

You throw out the "evil" word a lot, and it is always going one direction. So you acknowledge your concept of evil is pretty much arbitrary and tied to your ideological convictions? I mean, as long as you own it that is fine.

And I suppose a relevant corollary is that I don't think it's intellectually inconsistent to care a little more about things my government does than things other governments do. The world is definitely too big and too full of wrongs for me to give equal attention to all of them at the same time. I'm forced to choose to focus on some problems over others, and so is everyone else. Focusing a bit more on things closer to home seems like a reasonable way of prioritizing to me. I live in New Mexico, very close to the border with Texas, so these issues are quite literally closer to home.

Japan is evil. They are part of the West.

This is certainly all true, but I think you are minimizing the ideological component.

Just curious because I'm not sure you ever mentioned it, but what's YOUR position here? Are you ok with what's happening to these kids?

How is it tied to this issue at all?

Would those people be any less dead if we had given everyone amnesty a few years ago?

No. I am not ok with it. But I don't have any good solutions either. I mean very narrowly to the question in the OP we could and should make asylum living conditions better. But you could have said this 30, 20, 10, 5 years ago, and it would have been just as true. From what I can tell, this isn't a new problem. It just got marginally worse due to Trump's abhorrent political opportunism. And it isn't clear to me we would be having this discussion at all if Clinton had been elected president, and things wouldn't look much different on the ground level.

But I don't have very many ideas for workable longer term solutions to the greater immigration question. And despite all the rhetoric, which a lot of it I view as political/ideological opportunism, it doesn't appear to me anyone else does either. And I think the growing ideological divide is making it harder to prodcutively address larger issues such as this, instead of easier.

I’m thinking they’d be less dead if the people who killed them had either been prevented from entering the country or expeditiously deported.

This is clearly a lie; family separation is a Trump policy.

My sisters husbands brother works for the ACLU on asylum cases. All the horror stories you hear today aren't much different from the ones he was telling 20 years ago. Noone else finds it kind of perverse that it took Trump supporting something already well in place, before society at large decided it was time to do something about it?

I mean, maybe all we need to energize us to do something about the homeless situation is for Trump to start tweeting about how it isn't a problem at all?