4 ms·

I'm an open borders guy. I have been for years. I have no problem with vastly liberalizing immigration policy. I also have direct experience in immigration, ha

I'm an open borders guy. I have been for years. I have no problem with vastly liberalizing immigration policy. I also have direct experience in immigration, having worked at ICE for a couple of years. I know how it works on the inside. I've worked with immigrants and have done my best to help them my entire career. I've been very fortunate to have worked with great people from all over. Finally, I know a lot of people on both sides of this issue. If you are willing to accept new information, I'd like to share with you that the U.S. is not carrying out ethnic cleansing operations. To me that appears a very dramatic and unsupported claim, geared toward getting people upset (and keeping yourself upset) more than understanding the issues involved. I have a dozen things to be angry about when it comes to U.S. policy on immigration and travel. Almost weekly I am either angry or ashamed. But the world does not exist to conform to my emotional state. I have been angry about many of these things for a long, long time. None of that has anything to do with Bob. Picking out a new victim every week and publicly shaming them isn't going to bring people together to solve problems. This behavior is creating a world in which problems and conflict are just going to get worse, not reach resolution. These folks are not helping the very causes they claim to support -- one of another half-dozen things that drives me nuts about watching this idiocy. Want to fix this? Me too. Stop trying to keep exacerbating it.

InclinedPlane 8y ago
Do you even understand what ethnic cleansing is? Clearly you don't. The current administration is unquestionably undertaking a racist policy of deporting non-whites in service of demographic change. The idea that anyone could apply "both sidesism" to that sort of vile and horrific act is itself pretty vile. You may be reluctant to think that people who you think are just normal people (or even people you know and like) with (seemingly) good intentions who are "just doing their jobs" are actually key participates in crimes against humanity. But it has always been this way. Crimes against humanity are rarely committed by movie villains, they are committed by ordinary folks just like you and me, people you would think are good honest people if you judged them by their ordinary day to day activities. But those people are still capable of committing atrocities. And if you can watch an ordinary person commit an atrocity and still think they are a good, honest, ordinary person, then you are complicit. A lot of pretty ordinary people have done some horrific things throughout history, while even more ordinary people watched and did nothing.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  Do you want to talk immigration or internet shaming and productive conversations? I'd love to talk about immigration. I know a lot about it and would love to learn more. But the question here is whether or not this kind of internet behavior is productive or not. The title of the article is "Maybe We Should Go Easy On Uncle Bob". So the topic at hand is how we treat one another, especially people that say things that drive us nuts. I've allowed myself to get a little more emotional than usual on this because I know a lot of the people involved and I care about the issue. I need to ask myself, just like everybody else needs to ask themselves: how do I publicly treat people I feel to be acting immorally or saying things I find horrible and/or disgusting? Especially when I'm upset. It's a simple question, and it forms the foundation of this topic, whether it's immigration, Bob, whatever. For five years I kept on my office wall a picture of SWAT team members taking little Elián González from his family in Florida in the 90s. There's this false dichotomy that political weasels want you to believe: if you don't speak out and publicly moralize, it's because you don't care enough. That's complete crap. I believe in open, civil, and honest discourse exactly because I care so much about these issues. I don't want the internet to operate like some giant church group. I don't want to go back to the 1950s where there were some things that were okay to talk about in polite society and some things that weren't. Too many people have struggled for far too long to make speech open for us to head back into that abyss again. https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/c_crop,d_placeholder_euli9k,h_1440,w_2561,x_0,y_0/dpr_2.0/c_limit,w_740/fl_lossy,q_auto/v1494008894/articles/2017/04/28/the-saga-of-elian-gonzalez-a-lost-boy-who-was-finally-found/170427-zimmerman-tribeca-tease_nx9wef https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/c_crop,d_placehol...
dnomad 8y ago
This sort of thinking is hilarious, you've got admit. The most immediate example here is the gay marriage debate. It goes like this: Conservative: Gay people shouldn't be denied marriage to the people they love. Liberal: That position is pure fucking evil and you're a terrible person for believing such. Conservative: Why are liberals so mean? Of course the classic case of conservatives insisting that liberals are "uncivil" was during the actual civil rights movement. Oh how all the protests and speeches incensed people. To this day there's still many people who believe that the 60s protest movements for equal rights... somehow broke the West. None of this is new or particularly interesting. The heroic defenders of the status quo have always played this card. The more horrific position held up to and including, say, whether certain people should be allowed to exist, the stronger the calls for "civility" and "calm, reasonable debate." What's interesting here is perhaps the speed of Twitter. This dynamic no longer plays out in weekly newspaper columns. Now people get called out for their evil beliefs (and have no doubt, they are evil in the only meaningful sense of the word) in a matter of minutes. > This behavior is creating a world in which problems and conflict are just going to get worse, not reach resolution. That doesn't appear to be the case at all. It turns out that speaking up early and often does indeed work to, say, stop the government from destroying families. Certainly it seems far more effective than anything else proposed including "civil" debate.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  It is pretty funny. The people wanting us to be polite are always the ones getting in the way of finding solutions. That's because as it turns out, it's quite rude to have to re-think your worldview! No doubt there are some nice tactical wins. For each of those, my money says society loses more with all the people that get shut down and just don't talk any more. Admittedly that's a theoretical debate, but such is the nature of these things. Talking about theory, direct democracy was never a goal of the United States. In fact, there was a lot done to prevent it. Twitter closing the feedback loop and making things more direct and immediate would be considered a horrible step backwards by most of the people who understood why the country was structured the way it was. If we've got to learn that lesson again, I guess that's the way goes.
olefoo 8y ago
In this particular case; Mr Bob Martin is kind of a repeat offender. As far as I am concerned he's just another one of the overly famous white dudes with horrible opinions that have made the Ruby community seem quite toxic to many outsiders. Aside from stepping in on this thread; I certainly have not put him on blast on my twitter because as far as I'm concerned he's an irrelevancy. However, I do think that shame is a necessary part of a functioning civil society; particularly in a society where the levers of power have been systematically stolen by a faction that seems determined to ride the society into war to consolidate their power. A faction that willfully provokes ethnic cleansing to give their supporters a taste for blood. You may think I am being hyperbolic in my description of American politics; but I am if anything underselling it because I hope to reach a few people reading this thread. Calling out people who are normalizing active ethnic cleansing campaigns is just one part of it. People saying crap like Mr Martin should be shamed by the people who think they can be salvaged. But informing someone that their behavior is shameful and evidence of a reprehensible callousness to the humanity is not a particularly life-ruining event for the one being called out. Trying to excuse their behavior and take the lever of shame away from those who are attempting trigger society's immune response is bad and dangerous because it normalizes those opinions and makes them likely to spread further. tl;dr Don't shoot at the firemen trying to save your house.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

Do you even understand what ethnic cleansing is? Clearly you don't. The current administration is unquestionably undertaking a racist policy of deporting non-whites in service of demographic change. The idea that anyone could apply "both sidesism" to that sort of vile and horrific act is itself pretty vile. You may be reluctant to think that people who you think are just normal people (or even people you know and like) with (seemingly) good intentions who are "just doing their jobs" are actually key participates in crimes against humanity. But it has always been this way. Crimes against humanity are rarely committed by movie villains, they are committed by ordinary folks just like you and me, people you would think are good honest people if you judged them by their ordinary day to day activities. But those people are still capable of committing atrocities. And if you can watch an ordinary person commit an atrocity and still think they are a good, honest, ordinary person, then you are complicit. A lot of pretty ordinary people have done some horrific things throughout history, while even more ordinary people watched and did nothing.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
Do you want to talk immigration or internet shaming and productive conversations? I'd love to talk about immigration. I know a lot about it and would love to learn more. But the question here is whether or not this kind of internet behavior is productive or not. The title of the article is "Maybe We Should Go Easy On Uncle Bob". So the topic at hand is how we treat one another, especially people that say things that drive us nuts. I've allowed myself to get a little more emotional than usual on this because I know a lot of the people involved and I care about the issue. I need to ask myself, just like everybody else needs to ask themselves: how do I publicly treat people I feel to be acting immorally or saying things I find horrible and/or disgusting? Especially when I'm upset. It's a simple question, and it forms the foundation of this topic, whether it's immigration, Bob, whatever. For five years I kept on my office wall a picture of SWAT team members taking little Elián González from his family in Florida in the 90s. There's this false dichotomy that political weasels want you to believe: if you don't speak out and publicly moralize, it's because you don't care enough. That's complete crap. I believe in open, civil, and honest discourse exactly because I care so much about these issues. I don't want the internet to operate like some giant church group. I don't want to go back to the 1950s where there were some things that were okay to talk about in polite society and some things that weren't. Too many people have struggled for far too long to make speech open for us to head back into that abyss again. https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/c_crop,d_placeholder_euli9k,h_1440,w_2561,x_0,y_0/dpr_2.0/c_limit,w_740/fl_lossy,q_auto/v1494008894/articles/2017/04/28/the-saga-of-elian-gonzalez-a-lost-boy-who-was-finally-found/170427-zimmerman-tribeca-tease_nx9wef https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/c_crop,d_placehol...

dnomad 8y ago

This sort of thinking is hilarious, you've got admit. The most immediate example here is the gay marriage debate. It goes like this: Conservative: Gay people shouldn't be denied marriage to the people they love. Liberal: That position is pure fucking evil and you're a terrible person for believing such. Conservative: Why are liberals so mean? Of course the classic case of conservatives insisting that liberals are "uncivil" was during the actual civil rights movement. Oh how all the protests and speeches incensed people. To this day there's still many people who believe that the 60s protest movements for equal rights... somehow broke the West. None of this is new or particularly interesting. The heroic defenders of the status quo have always played this card. The more horrific position held up to and including, say, whether certain people should be allowed to exist, the stronger the calls for "civility" and "calm, reasonable debate." What's interesting here is perhaps the speed of Twitter. This dynamic no longer plays out in weekly newspaper columns. Now people get called out for their evil beliefs (and have no doubt, they are evil in the only meaningful sense of the word) in a matter of minutes. > This behavior is creating a world in which problems and conflict are just going to get worse, not reach resolution. That doesn't appear to be the case at all. It turns out that speaking up early and often does indeed work to, say, stop the government from destroying families. Certainly it seems far more effective than anything else proposed including "civil" debate.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
It is pretty funny. The people wanting us to be polite are always the ones getting in the way of finding solutions. That's because as it turns out, it's quite rude to have to re-think your worldview! No doubt there are some nice tactical wins. For each of those, my money says society loses more with all the people that get shut down and just don't talk any more. Admittedly that's a theoretical debate, but such is the nature of these things. Talking about theory, direct democracy was never a goal of the United States. In fact, there was a lot done to prevent it. Twitter closing the feedback loop and making things more direct and immediate would be considered a horrible step backwards by most of the people who understood why the country was structured the way it was. If we've got to learn that lesson again, I guess that's the way goes.

olefoo 8y ago

In this particular case; Mr Bob Martin is kind of a repeat offender. As far as I am concerned he's just another one of the overly famous white dudes with horrible opinions that have made the Ruby community seem quite toxic to many outsiders. Aside from stepping in on this thread; I certainly have not put him on blast on my twitter because as far as I'm concerned he's an irrelevancy. However, I do think that shame is a necessary part of a functioning civil society; particularly in a society where the levers of power have been systematically stolen by a faction that seems determined to ride the society into war to consolidate their power. A faction that willfully provokes ethnic cleansing to give their supporters a taste for blood. You may think I am being hyperbolic in my description of American politics; but I am if anything underselling it because I hope to reach a few people reading this thread. Calling out people who are normalizing active ethnic cleansing campaigns is just one part of it. People saying crap like Mr Martin should be shamed by the people who think they can be salvaged. But informing someone that their behavior is shameful and evidence of a reprehensible callousness to the humanity is not a particularly life-ruining event for the one being called out. Trying to excuse their behavior and take the lever of shame away from those who are attempting trigger society's immune response is bad and dangerous because it normalizes those opinions and makes them likely to spread further. tl;dr Don't shoot at the firemen trying to save your house.