Comment by runarberg
5 years ago
Agreed. Parent seems to think that engaging in rhetoric is universially fun and useful endeavor that will expand our mind and better us as a person. This is not true on a number of issues.
Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.
A number of people have full rights to be insulted when points are raised on a number of subjects. In fact they also have the rights to react angrily if the subject is a direct threat to their lives and livelihood. People arguing things often don’t realize that there is a person on the other end of the debate, a person with feelings, like love and compassion, but also anger and disgust. If a subject threatens or belittles, them being insulted or angry is the natural response.
> "A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported."
This is nonsense. I'm an immigrant who argues for limits. Certain subjects being (subjectively) sensitive to talk about doesn't mean they're unproductive because of it. In fact we'll never get anywhere if we don't talk about them.
Limiting speech arbitrarily, especially over very assumptive beliefs of offense, is a terrible thing. You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.
This. I'm also an immigrant myself that argues for limits.
> You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.
Exactly, and if you're not capable of engaging in that discussion productively, don't be surprised if your viewpoints and positions don't get the consideration you think they deserve.
Civil dialogue is the foundation upon which we find understanding in the face of disparate experiences. If you're feelings about the dialogue gets in the way of contributing to understanding, then it is you that is hurting your own cause.
> who argues for limits.
+1 , want to add, almost everyone argues for limits on immigration because without limits that would be an argument for _unlimited_ immigration.
Sometimes we construe ourselves as vastly separated "islands" of ideologies, when in reality we're more like tight clusters. That is we have similar ideals, and differentiate on how to accomplish them.
For example "Help the poor" is often agreed upon, but then argued about "How to help the poor" . (Do we give them tough love and bootstraps yada yada? or Do we give them support, resources and encouragement and yada yada?).
> Limiting speech arbitrarily [...] is a terrible thing.
This is not true. We do limit speech, both through moderation (like here on HN), terms of service (e.g. on Twitter, Facebook etc.), codes of conduct (in our workplace), in our legal society (slander, hate-speech, etc.), etc. But also through our moral behavior. As humans we know that some topics are insensitive to talk about around some people (e.g. we don’t tell yo'mama jokes around a recently orphaned person).
Debating against abortion around a person that is at risk of being forced into pregnancy, or against gay rights against a person not allowed to openly express their love for their same-sex partner is a truly offensive thing to do. When a platform limits such a speech it is acting in a very human way.
Sussing an offensive party to protect the rights of the disenfranchised one is what normal humans do in a normal conversation.
First, protecting the rights of the disenfranchised means, by definition, they are not disenfranchised. I'm not sure why you keep using that word.
Second, if we rewind to the original comment, it's clearly talking about people "who are offended by everything", on a platform where everything offends someone. This is not about rules or regulations, or personal behavior; all of which have very specific context in which they apply.
Rather it's about the lack of engagement with different perspectives by labelling everything taboo at such a scale and breadth as to prevent any possible discussion, and the worrisome self-censorship as a result. You're only reinforcing this point with your sweeping generalizations on behalf of people and situations you don't represent.
If you find something offensive then you are free to not participate, but you do not have the right to limit their speech. You're not protecting anyone's right by doing so, and I find it the very opposite of human to regress towards silence instead of moving forward through reason.
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You can't just label some topics as "Disenfranchising issues" and then cease to have debate on the topic. There's always going to be a debate on to what extent should society go out of its way to enfranchise people and to what extent is the onus on the individual." You can't just shutdown these topics because you want more than others are willing to give. You can't label people hateful just because they don't want to be generous and you certainly can't shutdown the debate on the extent to which people are entitled to generosity or frugality.
I don't think GP was labeling anyone as hateful. Escalation isn't very helpful in my opinion.
It’s not being hateful it’s just being honest. Sorry if the Truth offends you. This thread is like a bunch of steroid users becoming up with reasons why they need them
Some topics are sensitive, but that's not a reason to stop discussing these issues. We need dialogue or the political divide will just keep growing.
> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people,
Immigration is a zero sum game. No developed country can accept all immigrants wanting to live there. Neither leftist nor more conservative immigration policy gives every immigrant who wants to the opportunity to enter the United States. The claim that left-leaning individual's immigration policy is not 'disenfranchising' is laughable. For every person entering from South America, some number of people cannot enter from another country. You can say this is not the case all you want, but given that immigration does put pressure on a country's resources, this is always true. Similarly, if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.
You can't just say something is disenfranchising and thus non-negotiable. For example, you say the pro-life position is disenfranchising because -- I assume -- you believe it takes away the right of a woman to not have a child. However, a pro-life person would make the obvious argument that actually the pro-choice position is disenfranchising because there is a person -- the child -- who is being killed without having a say in it. Should the pro-choice position now become unmentionable?
> No developed country can accept all immigrants wanting to live there.
"developed": The US and Europe are rich.
"wanting": Other people want to be rich. That's why they come.
If US/Europe worshipped money less, they would be less rich. There would be less incentive for others to come, or for incumbents to keep them out. If you want to reduce flow, reduce pressure.
Here's the thing though: You, and your children, would have to work for a living.
> immigration does put pressure on a country's resources
Does it? Or are immigrants the resource being consumed? Seems to me they do the work. And once their children are Americanized, how many grandchildren will they have? Fewer. The US needs immigrants like a car needs gasoline. It eats them.
> if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.
Only if there's a cap. Which is uncreative. Do the opposite. Aggressively add people to the ranks of the United States.
Imagine: Tomorrow, Trump comes on the TV and, in terrible Spanish, invites the people of Baha California (both states), Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas to hold referenda under Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution, about joining the United States. They'd be enticed by what's left of the "American dream", sun-belt voters would get a shot at cheaper and sunnier real estate, and factory workers could go to where the jobs are. The problem with NAFTA is that capital can flow but workers can't. So let the people move freely too! And if the Russians can run a foreign influence campaign to make Brexit happen, why can't the US do a Mexic-enter?
We can make the sum be much, much more than zero.
None of this is true. Immigrants come for better opportunity and living conditions, not to be "rich" although the ability to actually do so is welcomed.
If the countries they were coming from had better conditions then there would be less need to immigrate, and it would also help far more people. That's what people who are for immigration reform and strong borders want. Why would you rather have countries be worse to stop immigration rather than lifting the others up?
And the vast majority of people have to work for a living so why would immigration change that? Immigrants are not "consumed" whatever that means.
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Thank you! I’ve been biting my lips not to correct these comments about how “immigration is (sometimes) bad” because I’m trying to focus on grandparent’s point. But you said it much better then I could have.
Having mexic-enter is vastly different than immigration. It's dishonest to compare the two.
Namely.. I am someone who is against illegal immigration but I would support mexico joining the usa
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Those disenfranchising issues have affected people on the other side. Those parents probably know a few.
Getting angry is natural, but anger is easy. Advancement of the cause doesn't entail getting likes, hearts or clap-backs. The real work is in persuasion.
You’re talking about _illegal immigration_.
Legal immigrants, which is the majority and the ones generally designed by the word “immigrants” (without qualitatif), aren’t being deported. Legal and illegal immigrations are two different topics (social, political, economical), it doesn’t really make sense to mix them.
Also I’m an immigrant myself and argue for some level of immigration control, and that’s the case for every single expat I know.
Being angry about an opinion is fine. That doesn't mean you should try to stop people from talking about it.
Save from the feedback of concrete actions being taken (which you want to avoid), discussion by a diverse crowd is the only way to properly surface the harmfulness of a viewpoint.
Making an opinion politically incorrect won't stop people from holding it, they may on the contrary feel validated by it.
As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
The ultimate expression of Tyranny of the Majority, completely automated.
> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being.
To achieve long lasting social changes you have to have a dialogue and convince the other party, if you think the entirety of your opinion is so morally justified that even having further debate is morally wrong then you can never achieve permanent social change it will just be temporary.
> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.
There is a limit at which this is true, but most discussion of these issues doesn’t encroach into that territory. As an immigrant from a Muslim country I don’t feel “threats to my safety” when Trump talks about Islamic fundamentalism or extra scrutiny over immigration from certain countries. (It would be pretty odd to declare those topics off-limits, seeing as how the Muslim country I’m from has taken aggressive measures to fight the same exact fundamentalist forces.) I might feel differently if we were talking about putting Muslims in internment camps. But nobody is doing that, even though the left is acting like they are.
Does the US have “too many immigrants?” Until 2007, a plurality of Hispanic Americans (many of whom are immigrants) said “yes.” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Even today, 1 in 4 do. Only 14% say we have “too few immigrants” (which is the view de facto embraced by our current policies, which will lead to increased numbers of immigrants.) Given those views, it’s bizarre to treat discussion of immigration issues as off-limits.
You see this on issue after issue: leftists declare huge swaths of issues as off limits for discussion even to the point of excluding discussion of positions held by large swaths of the groups at issue. For example, 37% of women want to restrict Roe further or overrule it completely, compared to 38% who want to loosen its restrictions either somewhat or significantly. Another 16% want to maintain the status quo. http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NPR_.... Supermajorities of women, moreover, support measures like waiting periods.
Or, consider “police brutality.” An editor at the NYT was fired for running a op-ed by Tom Cotton advocating a law-and-order response to violence following the death of George Floyd. Recent polling shows that a majority of Hispanic people, who are disproportionately the target of aggressive policing, think “the breakdown of law and order” is a “bigger problem” than “systemic racism.” Large majorities of Black and Hispanic people want to either maintain existing levels of policing, or further increase them.
In practice, it’s your approach that’s “disenfranchising.” That rule makes the majority uncomfortable with expressing anything but the most left-leaning views with respect to a minority group. For example, Ilhan Omar and Linda Saraour say expectations of assimilation are “racist.” This is not even a mainstream opinion among American Muslims, who are one of the most assimilated groups in the country. (To the point that a majority voted for George W. Bush in 2000.) But a big fraction of well-meaning non-Muslims don’t want to be called racist. So they feel comfortable amplifying anti-assimilationist views, but not pro-assimilationist ones. Since non-Muslims are a huge majority of people, that dramatically distorts and biases the debate around Muslim assimilation in a manner that doesn’t reflect the views of Muslims themselves.
That phenomenon has had a real impact on the debate over abortion. A quarter of Democratic women want to further restrict Roe or overrule it. That viewpoint is completely unrepresented among Democratic men.
You wrote a good comment a couple years about about the dynamics here. "Leftists" oppose discussions about incremental regulation of abortion for the same reader "right-wingers" oppose those discussions about firearms: both sides assume the discussion is a slippery slope towards all-out prohibition, and both sides have valid reasons to believe that.
In this comment, you depict left-of-center resistance to these discussions as irrational. But of course, it's not at all irrational; in fact, it's probably vital.
In that context I was talking about political strategy. I think its rational for Democrats as a party to oppose abortion restrictions. But here I’m talking about whether certain issues should be off-limits for discussion. Folks on the far left accuse men of being misogynist if they express opposition to using federal funds for abortion, even though 50-60% of women themselves, depending on the poll, express such opposition. That distorts the debate.
There are also special considerations when you’re talking about issues that affect minorities, outside a political context. There, the approach of selectively amplifying extreme positions can overwhelm ideological diversity (or even majority views) within minority groups. The other day, my dad—a blue dog Democrat—expressed his frustration at how “the media has made Ilhan Omar the face of Muslims.” I’ve observed the palpable discomfort people in liberal circles have expressing views on immigration to the right of Omar. They feel like the way to be “allies”—and insulate themselves from being called racist—is to “amplify” views like her’s. But the net result of that is that debate around issues like assimilation—within the left—is totally dominated by these extreme views. And that seriously disenfranchises people. Especially in contexts, such as academic institutions and media, controlled by the left, where there is no need to deal with the potential opposite extreme positions on the right.
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This is what the guy is talking about.
You're on the left. Your current political pet issues aren't something you're willing to debate - instead you're announcing that anyone who disagrees with you is a "threat".
A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration
Limits on immigration aren't a "devil's advocacy" position, they're the de-facto standard around the world for obvious and common sense reasons.
This is why the modern left is so awful. You take something that every single place in the world does and describe it as being basically the same as clubbing someone over the head. You refuse to even attempt to engage with the vast majority who think your position is nonsense.
This is why "social cooling" happens, if we accept the use of that term. It is a problem created by people like you.
> This is why the modern left is so awful.
That is a huge, unhelpful generalization. I am pretty far to the left and I consider immigration a perfectly reasonable topic to debate. Most everyone in my circle of friends feel the same way. The 'cancel culture', as it were, is just a subgroup of the left. And frankly, there is a cancel culture on the right, too.
> The 'cancel culture', as it were, is just a subgroup of the left. And frankly, there is a cancel culture on the right, too.
Yes. On this I will agree with you strongly. Both varieties of cancel-culture are essentially the bulwarks of the false dichotomy of American politics - serving as backstops to try to keep people in the middle, which itself is a controlled position.
You're to the left of that. There's actually a lot more to discuss out there, and out to the right of it, than many people realize. For example, broad agreement on rights for workers to a fair wage, benefits, etc. - you'd be surprised how popular that is with the modern American right, when you can get them out from the GOP paradigm and weak, unhelpful talking points.
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>This is why the modern left is so awful. You take something that every single place in the world does and describe it as being basically the same as clubbing someone over the head. You refuse to even attempt to engage with the vast majority who think your position is nonsense.
And painting those you call "the left" with such a broad brush, and ignoring that there is great diversity of opinion within that artificial, amorphous group is "basically clubbing someone over the head" and refusing to engage with them, even though study after study shows that (at least within the US, and likely across much of the world) we have much more in common WRT the kind of society we want than we do differences.
Those that create conflict from those differences (as you appear to be trying to do) are, if the goal is to create a better society for everyone rather than just satisfying oneself that he/she is right and "they" are wrong, are taking entirely the wrong tack.
Instead, let's celebrate the stuff we have in common, use those more prevalent commonalities to humanize and bring those of us who disagree about the differences together in a positive mode, rather than a dismissive, adversarial one.
Yes, the left is a broad spectrum with many varied positions within it. But this article is about the very specific phenomenon of people feeling they can't express their views on social media, and the number one reason for that by far is the very specific slice of the left that viciously attacks anyone who publicly deviates from their very specific set of acceptable policy issues.
The people on the receiving end may well be on the equally amorphous right, or they may be more classical leftists who are more concerned with workers and unions than identity politics, it doesn't really matter. In the end cancel culture is not, in fact, a bipartisan thing - it is virtually always about the same small set of topics and the same people with the same views doing the cancelling.
It's a serious issue, which is why we are seeing more and more discussions of it. It would be great to celebrate that which we have in common, and I'd love to see more of that, but ultimately it's hard to celebrate differences when those differences are being used as justification for "cancellation", something which can have a very negative consequences for those concerned. The whole problem is people who don't respectfully disagree and use rhetoric comparing disagreement to physical violence as a justification.
I wish more people on the left took the time to familiarize themselves with the work of Harvard researcher/professor George Borjas that has probably done the most rigorous work into the impact of immigration both pros and cons and considering all affected.
His op-ed in politico from 2016 is a good introduction to the issues he tries to tackle:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...
There's a palpable lack of self awareness in the comment you're responding too because there is an implicit non-recognition of the very real concerns that immigration presents to people that are hurt by immigration. I'm one of the people that benefits from immigration, but I'm not blind to the fact that some people in the country do not benefit from immigration. Those people and current immigrants are my neighbors and future immigrants are my future neighbors. It's important to consider how immigration impacts more than just current immigrants like myself and future immigrants.