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Good job sneaking in a comparison of Trump to the Nazis without a shred of supporting argument. I'm no Trump fan but the comparisons to Hitler are totally unwar

Good job sneaking in a comparison of Trump to the Nazis without a shred of supporting argument. I'm no Trump fan but the comparisons to Hitler are totally unwarranted. Take his most controversial proposal. Deporting 11 million people--who don't have the right to be here in the first place--is bad policy and callous, but it's fair. There's plenty of examples of populist nationalist leaders hurting their countries, like Berlusconi in Italy. No need to raise the false specter of concentration camps, mass murder, and totalitarianism.

tamana 11y ago
He also proposed banning all Muslims from entering the US, and tagging and tracking all curent Muslim residents.
- refurb 11y ago
  These political arguments never seem to go well, but anyways... I'd love to see a source/quote on that. From the news that I saw (actually digging into the details), Trump said something like "Until we have the proper means to screen Muslims for security risk, I propose we put a (temporary) halt to letting them immigrate." This was in direct response to the attacks in France. Now, for a lot of people, that's still an offensive proposal, but it's not the same as "lets ban all Muslims (forever)". What I think is interesting about Trump's appeal is that he doesn't filter what he says. A seasoned politician would say "I'm committed to securing this country against terrorist threats", then they put a ton of Muslims on no-fly lists and you kind of get the same thing. But it doesn't look as bad. I get the sense a lot of people, when they listen to Trump, think "At least he doesn't offer watered down drivel like most politicians".
  - foldr 11y ago
    First of all, the whole idea of some kind of special screening process for Muslims is already discriminatory, and quite possibly unconstitutional in itself. Second, it's patently obvious that no brilliant new techniques for screening out terrorists are magically going to materialize all of a sudden, so that the "temporary" ban would become effectively permanent.
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      The US government has essentially zero legal obligation to admit non-residents into the country. The law can and does discriminate against travelers and prospective immigrants based on country of origin, for example. Entry into the United States for foreigners is a privilege, not a right. That said, a blanket ban on Muslims entering is a brain-dead idea. But I see no good reason why the United States shouldn't consider all information when deciding how to allocate its limited resources for additional screening.
      - foldr 11y ago
        As to your first point, the US government is bound by the constition, and legal opinion is split as to the constitutionality of a ban on all Muslims. http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-LB-52706 http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-LB-52706 As to the second point, whether or not someone is a Muslim gives you essentially zero information as to whether or not they are a terrorist. (Trivially, it makes them more likely to be an Islamic terrorist, just as Hindus are more likely than non-Hindus to be Hindu terrorists. But since such a miniscule fraction of Muslims are terrorists, applying additional screening to Muslims would make no difference.)
stcredzero 11y ago
No need to raise the false specter of concentration camps, mass murder, and totalitarianism. For one thing, only item #1 is alarming enough. Anyone who advocates concentration camps does deserve at least a raised eyebrow. Second: logistically, how in the world do you deport 11 million people without ending up with concentration camps? If you do this at any speed faster than "glacial," you will effectively get concentration camps.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Well, Europe is choke-full with concentration camps for immigrants to be detained and then approved or deported -- while few would call its leaders Nazis: http://en.closethecamps.org/ http://en.closethecamps.org/ And Roosevelt and Truman had Japanese Americans thrown in concentration camps and nobody called them a "Nazi" (the latter also had 250,000 men, women and children obliterated in a combined unneeded weapon test/show of power, but I digress).
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    Well, Europe is choke-full with concentration camps for immigrants to be detained and then approved or deported -- while few would call its leaders Nazis It's one thing to have such things forced upon you by circumstance. It's quite another thing to actively create the circumstance, especially when the majority of people who would wind up in them are basically ordinary people trying to get by. And Roosevelt and Truman had Japanese Americans thrown in concentration camps and nobody called them a "Nazi" Comparisons have been made, and I think those are useful exercises of awareness. The fact that there's this knee-jerk reaction that effectively short circuits rational analysis of historical fact is detrimental to learning from history. Nazis, "The Greatest Generation," rank and file Japanese soldiery -- all of the above are human beings placed in particular situations. We need to learn from history to prevent such circumstances from happening again, and be able to think clearly about the same social, economic, and psychological mechanisms at play in today's world. There are no demons in history. There are only human beings and natural circumstances. The only demons in history are those we imagine, as our minds still inhabit a "demon filled world." This is part of what we refer to as "waking up from history."
vacri 11y ago
The Nazis in the '30s weren't talking about concentration camps and mass murder either, and fascism was fairly new and didn't have the negative connotations to totalitarianism that it has today. The Nazis in the '30s were about demonising and driving out the Jews so that the money and jobs would go to 'proper Germans', and weren't exactly shouting their plans to mass-murder minorities halfway through an upcoming war. > bad policy and callous, but it's fair. A lot of people disagree that it's fair, from both moral and economic standpoints.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  That's just not true. Hitler openly advocated for the extermination of the Jews for years before the Nazis' rise to power.
lazaroclapp 11y ago
"the false specter of concentration camps" Because this is a civilized justice system reacting to people whose only crime is to be residing in a place or working without proper authorization: https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G_20100723214924.jpg https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G... Don't get me wrong, I know we are not at the 'trains full people taken to be burned at the ovens' stage. But you know what Trump calls the picture above? He calls it being too soft on immigration... He is running in a xenophobic platform, in which he tells a largely uneducated frustrated majority that all their problems derive from a few already underpriviledged minority groups in their country, and that the correct response is electing a tough leader that will make those minorities pay and restore the country to imagined past glories. How on earth is a comparison to Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy not an appropriate analogy here?
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  >Because this is a civilized justice system reacting to people whose only crime is to be residing in a place or working without proper authorization https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G_20100723214924.jpg https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G... Are you arguing that it's morally wrong to deport people who are in a country illegally? How else do you enforce the law? Should I just be able to waltz into any country and have the right to stay forever? And of course deporting someone requires temporary detention. Obama has deported over a million people during his presidency. Where's the indignation for that? >Don't get me wrong, I know we are not at the 'trains full people taken to be burned at the ovens' stage. But you know what Trump calls the picture above? He calls it being too soft on immigration... Now you're just making this stuff up.
- Chris2048 11y ago
  > I know we are not at the 'trains full people taken to be burned at the ovens' stage This implies that there is a natural progression from holding/detailing immigrants, to mass murder. Is that what you are saying? That it's a slippery slope?

tamana 11y ago

He also proposed banning all Muslims from entering the US, and tagging and tracking all curent Muslim residents.

refurb 11y ago
These political arguments never seem to go well, but anyways... I'd love to see a source/quote on that. From the news that I saw (actually digging into the details), Trump said something like "Until we have the proper means to screen Muslims for security risk, I propose we put a (temporary) halt to letting them immigrate." This was in direct response to the attacks in France. Now, for a lot of people, that's still an offensive proposal, but it's not the same as "lets ban all Muslims (forever)". What I think is interesting about Trump's appeal is that he doesn't filter what he says. A seasoned politician would say "I'm committed to securing this country against terrorist threats", then they put a ton of Muslims on no-fly lists and you kind of get the same thing. But it doesn't look as bad. I get the sense a lot of people, when they listen to Trump, think "At least he doesn't offer watered down drivel like most politicians".
- foldr 11y ago
  First of all, the whole idea of some kind of special screening process for Muslims is already discriminatory, and quite possibly unconstitutional in itself. Second, it's patently obvious that no brilliant new techniques for screening out terrorists are magically going to materialize all of a sudden, so that the "temporary" ban would become effectively permanent.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    The US government has essentially zero legal obligation to admit non-residents into the country. The law can and does discriminate against travelers and prospective immigrants based on country of origin, for example. Entry into the United States for foreigners is a privilege, not a right. That said, a blanket ban on Muslims entering is a brain-dead idea. But I see no good reason why the United States shouldn't consider all information when deciding how to allocate its limited resources for additional screening.
    - foldr 11y ago
      As to your first point, the US government is bound by the constition, and legal opinion is split as to the constitutionality of a ban on all Muslims. http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-LB-52706 http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-LB-52706 As to the second point, whether or not someone is a Muslim gives you essentially zero information as to whether or not they are a terrorist. (Trivially, it makes them more likely to be an Islamic terrorist, just as Hindus are more likely than non-Hindus to be Hindu terrorists. But since such a miniscule fraction of Muslims are terrorists, applying additional screening to Muslims would make no difference.)

stcredzero 11y ago

No need to raise the false specter of concentration camps, mass murder, and totalitarianism. For one thing, only item #1 is alarming enough. Anyone who advocates concentration camps does deserve at least a raised eyebrow. Second: logistically, how in the world do you deport 11 million people without ending up with concentration camps? If you do this at any speed faster than "glacial," you will effectively get concentration camps.

coldtea 11y ago
Well, Europe is choke-full with concentration camps for immigrants to be detained and then approved or deported -- while few would call its leaders Nazis: http://en.closethecamps.org/ http://en.closethecamps.org/ And Roosevelt and Truman had Japanese Americans thrown in concentration camps and nobody called them a "Nazi" (the latter also had 250,000 men, women and children obliterated in a combined unneeded weapon test/show of power, but I digress).
- stcredzero 11y ago
  Well, Europe is choke-full with concentration camps for immigrants to be detained and then approved or deported -- while few would call its leaders Nazis It's one thing to have such things forced upon you by circumstance. It's quite another thing to actively create the circumstance, especially when the majority of people who would wind up in them are basically ordinary people trying to get by. And Roosevelt and Truman had Japanese Americans thrown in concentration camps and nobody called them a "Nazi" Comparisons have been made, and I think those are useful exercises of awareness. The fact that there's this knee-jerk reaction that effectively short circuits rational analysis of historical fact is detrimental to learning from history. Nazis, "The Greatest Generation," rank and file Japanese soldiery -- all of the above are human beings placed in particular situations. We need to learn from history to prevent such circumstances from happening again, and be able to think clearly about the same social, economic, and psychological mechanisms at play in today's world. There are no demons in history. There are only human beings and natural circumstances. The only demons in history are those we imagine, as our minds still inhabit a "demon filled world." This is part of what we refer to as "waking up from history."

vacri 11y ago

The Nazis in the '30s weren't talking about concentration camps and mass murder either, and fascism was fairly new and didn't have the negative connotations to totalitarianism that it has today. The Nazis in the '30s were about demonising and driving out the Jews so that the money and jobs would go to 'proper Germans', and weren't exactly shouting their plans to mass-murder minorities halfway through an upcoming war. > bad policy and callous, but it's fair. A lot of people disagree that it's fair, from both moral and economic standpoints.

marcoperaza 11y ago
That's just not true. Hitler openly advocated for the extermination of the Jews for years before the Nazis' rise to power.

lazaroclapp 11y ago

"the false specter of concentration camps" Because this is a civilized justice system reacting to people whose only crime is to be residing in a place or working without proper authorization: https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G_20100723214924.jpg https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G... Don't get me wrong, I know we are not at the 'trains full people taken to be burned at the ovens' stage. But you know what Trump calls the picture above? He calls it being too soft on immigration... He is running in a xenophobic platform, in which he tells a largely uneducated frustrated majority that all their problems derive from a few already underpriviledged minority groups in their country, and that the correct response is electing a tough leader that will make those minorities pay and restore the country to imagined past glories. How on earth is a comparison to Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy not an appropriate analogy here?

marcoperaza 11y ago
>Because this is a civilized justice system reacting to people whose only crime is to be residing in a place or working without proper authorization https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G_20100723214924.jpg https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AW395_Arzimm_G... Are you arguing that it's morally wrong to deport people who are in a country illegally? How else do you enforce the law? Should I just be able to waltz into any country and have the right to stay forever? And of course deporting someone requires temporary detention. Obama has deported over a million people during his presidency. Where's the indignation for that? >Don't get me wrong, I know we are not at the 'trains full people taken to be burned at the ovens' stage. But you know what Trump calls the picture above? He calls it being too soft on immigration... Now you're just making this stuff up.
Chris2048 11y ago
> I know we are not at the 'trains full people taken to be burned at the ovens' stage This implies that there is a natural progression from holding/detailing immigrants, to mass murder. Is that what you are saying? That it's a slippery slope?