It's a shame so many people can't function without being afraid/angry at a dehumanized "other". Sometimes it's outright malice (Syrian refugees today), sometimes it's softer but just as harmful ("the Japanese are going to take over the world!!" in the 1980s) and sometimes it's from within (Japanese and Italians in WWII, the entire history of black citizens in the USA).
And when a new "enemy" arrives that's more appealing than the old "enemy" we reclassify the old "enemy" to be on "our side" (i.e. Greeks, Italians, etc used to be considered non-white).
It is important to understand the United States is leading a bombing campaign that has recently killed over 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq. Killing people on a vast scale from countries and also accepting immigrants (including military age males) from the same country at the same time is more complicated than #WereACountryOfImmigrants.
While that may be true, the odds that something that hasn't happened in eight years could happen in 90 days are pretty small. Most of what agitated people was the order's execution, which involved some fallout that may have been avoidable.
> United States is leading a bombing campaign that has recently killed over 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq
Isn't it a bit disingenuous to omit the fact that both Iraq and Syria have areas experiencing active warfare? The bombing campaign is not occurring in a vacuum, is targeted at people engaged in warfare against us or our allies, and those conflicts have killed far more people than just the bombing campaign - including via the use of chemical weapons.
I'm not trying to justify civilian casualties, the ongoing drone attacks on multiple continents, or even answer whether we should be involved in these conflicts - I just think the situation is more nuanced than "the US has bombed/killed 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq".
I'm aware that the US/NATO was involved in the Arab Spring. But again, I think the reality was far more complex - Mohamed Bouazizi didn't immolate himself because the CIA/MI6 told him to. There were videos from the time of people marching and being shot by their governments - those governments could have chosen to bring meaningful reform but instead chose violence. Likewise with Assad in Syria - the CIA/MI6 aren't making him drop barrel bombs or use chemical weapons.
Even outside of internal pressures, geopolitics are at play as well - Iran and Russia are playing "the great game" as much as the US/NATO are in the fight against terrorism.
Since the so-called Arab Spring started in Tunisia, you have to ask yourself why we didn't push for "regime change" in that country.
The demonstrations in Syria were not spontaneous. They were engineered. If you have time, read the email exchanges between the US ambassador to Syria and H. Clinton.
Regarding Iran and Russia playing "the great game", they're supporting the legitimate govt of that country. Without their support, Assad would have been dead years ago, and Syria would have been in worse shape than it is now.
We probably share the same opinion on why no one has pushed for "regime change" in Tunisia.
Iran is definitely playing geopolitics when they arm Houthis (fighting the internationally recognized government) with anti ship missiles in the Strait of Hormuz. Were they also not arming the Iraqi insurgents/sending military forces over the border during the height of the conflict in Iraq? How about Russia in Ukraine (are the "little green men" freedom fighters or rebels?)? Russia has more than just the support of a government in mind when it supports Syria.
I'm not saying one side is right or wrong - just that none of these actions happen in a vacuum.
Considering that Iran has been, without the least exaggeration, in active cross-hair of the "great game" of the Anglo vs Russ for the past 150 years, saying that Iran is playing the "great game" is rather bizzare.
But think about this for a second; if not for us destabilizing those countries, there will be no refugee crisis to deal with.
We basically took the most and arguably the most prosperous country in Africa (Libya) and ruined it. Now we're refusing to take in those fleeing from our mess. We did the same thing in Iraq and Syria.
But it seems we're not done yet. Iran is next.
Bit is anybody protesting war against countries that can do us no harm? Nah! It makes for good war video games and Hollywood war movies.
Göring [1]: "the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Seems like a lot of these historical incidents are being brought up recently. They are certainly interesting and perhaps show that humanity as a whole tend to repeat the same actions.
But is it also the goal to attempt to justify the current immigration ban by citing history? Conway brought up the Obama's tightening of the Iraqi immigration during his term. Does that somehow justify Trump's immigration ban?
I guess you can say she is just pointing out the media hypocrisy in being less judgmental with Obama than with Trump and that may be fair. But ultimately it is just a distraction in some sense. I fear Trump's camp is sticking to the "the media is hypocritical" campaign as a distraction. I guess it's a clever way to use the free bad press.
>But is it also the goal to attempt to justify the current immigration ban by citing history?
I find it interesting how we see this kind of "news" (reports?) in opposite ways.
I see it as a message of "We've done this before - and it was wrong then too! We often talked about how bad and stupid it was we did it at all, yet we're coming full circle."
Because I see the media as being largely left-biased, I see these reports as an attempt to remind or educate people on our history. Not supportive of the actions but critical of them. Meanwhile, I see right-leaning media as being more supportive of the actions and less critical (because they largely are...)
> But is it also the goal to attempt to justify the current immigration ban by citing history?
No, none of the articles I've read describe the past historical incidents in a positive light. They're attempting to compare modern actions (discriminating against Muslims) with past actions (discriminating against Italians, or Japanese, or women, or African-Americans). Similar comparisons are made between the Prohibition (of alcohol) and the War on Drugs.
The historical incidents are widely and easily recognized to be wrong because we're emotionally distant from them. People should be able to learn from history and realize that analogous actions today are similarly wrong.
"Conway brought up the Obama's tightening of the Iraqi immigration during his term. Does that somehow justify Trump's immigration ban?
-- No it doesn't What Trump did is not just stop immigration, but completely stop even people with valid visas, and green cards (Permanent Residents) from even entering. This is unheard off.
Some of them were "detained", put with handcuffed for over 20 hrs.
In the midst of it there were a 5 yo, grandmas, and folks that worked for the US government, and served this country.
Completely different than just slowing down/stopping refugees coming in. The executive order was cruel and poorly implemented, (and parts of it most likely illegal).
Though of course, said former Prime Minister was actually detained under an Obama-era policy that had nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with a law passed in late 2015 that had overwhelming bipartisan support. One which got very little coverage until it could be tied to Trump's actions somehow.
It appears that Trump's CBP is significantly different from Obama's though. Where CBP had the option to stop travelers and didn't exercise it in the past, they're now doing so more frequently (at least for the subset of travelers in targeted countries).
This is the problem with giving wide latitude to a trusted administration - it doesn't stop there.
> CBP had the option to stop travelers and didn't exercise it in the past
I had a colleague on H1b who was sent home because his port of new york when his place of employment was houston. He was going to visit his sister there before flying to houston.
This is not a rare exception. There were many, many cases like this in 2009.
If you have a visa or Green Card and are from one of the 7 countries, or have a passport stamp from one of those countries, I would DEFINITELY consult an immigration lawyer before travelling outside the USA right now.
I don't think these WWII-era actions are being brought up to justify anything. It's pretty widely agreed that Japanese internment was really bad, for example, and I think other stuff from that time tends to be seen is the same light.
I have seen a lot of cries of hypocrisy, involving Obama's Iraq action you mention, and other things like drone strikes. It's a bit silly, since Obama did get a lot of criticism for this stuff, so the only argument for hypocrisy is that he should have had more. It's not something where a group was totally for X in one case, and totally against it in another case.
Anyway, if someone thinks this stuff is good, they should be able to make the case for it directly. They especially shouldn't be leaning on Obama's actions to justify it when their candidate's platform largely boiled down to "I am the opposite of Obama."
> It's a bit silly, since Obama did get a lot of criticism for this stuff, so the only argument for hypocrisy is that he should have had more.
That's a fair point, right? People weren't skipping work and class to march in the town square when Obama bombed Yemen and other countries, but they'll do it when Trump makes a (insensitive, idiotic, broken, heavy-handed, unjust) change to the visa process?
It can be a fair point, depending on exactly what the ultimate argument is.
Some have used this argument to defend Trump's actions. It doesn't work for that at all. "You didn't protest sufficiently about Obama, so you should approve of Trump's policies" is just a non sequitur.
Some have used this argument to say that we should have protested more about these other things. That argument works, but it's not actionable unless someone invents a time machine (and we'd have to go back and assassinate Hitler first anyway).
The only good, useful argument to be made with this is that we should be more critical and more willing to make ourselves heard in the future, which is great, but I don't know that I've seen anyone make it.
> "You didn't protest sufficiently about Obama, so you should approve of Trump's policies" is just a non sequitur.
The argument is that the current reaction doesn't make sense given recent history. So the current "debate" is instead a placeholder for a culture war, disappointment with the election results, or something.
That is, the non sequitur is the new levels of disgust. The non sequitur is resolved if you add some subtext that make Obama deserve a (perhaps begrudging) pass and Trump a fail.
> That argument works, but it's not actionable...
Sure it's actionable. Politicians apologize for letting Obama get a pass. Some writers rip Obama a new one in ex post facto editorials. Propose laws to make sure president's can't bomb countries without Congressional approval. Propose laws giving Congress more oversight into the visa process, etc. Shoot, propose Constitutional Amendments if the rights of foreign nationals aren't clear enough.
> The only good, useful argument to be made with this is that we should be more critical and more willing to make ourselves heard in the future
Honestly, being heard isn't the problem. Trump supporters know what others think. Corporate America literally has TV specials, policies, and training courses about this stuff. The people with different concerns are just on different wavelengths, so there's no conversation, just a big struggle over the reigns of power.
We need to actually understand others' arguments (so we can in turn be better understood) instead of wondering if we need to do a better job of making themselves heard.
People seem to label everything in politics with a positive or negative name, depending on their beliefs.
The left and right are so noisy with their claims, I'm having a hard time filtering through all the noise. If we could use a little math in our labeling, we wouldn't get an equality on the ban being for "Muslims". Perhaps we could have our Deep Learning machines come up with Classification names.
It's also worth noting that these things rarely begin with total action against an "other" -- they begin with baby steps, striking at the most vulnerable and easily scapegoated. The Holocaust didn't begin with Nazis shipping all the Jews to concentration camps, it began with things like protests against Jewish business owners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_boycott_of_Jewish_busines...) and laws punishing Christians who married Jews (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws).
Which is why it's critical to oppose these horrible ideas when they are still in their early, tentative steps. Once they pick up momentum, they are much harder to stop.
They call it 'Muslim ban' because that term is used by Trump and his team [1]. He basically wanted to demonstrate to his voter base "I promised Muslim ban and I delivered it".
On one hand all those enforcement agencies were a bunch of jerks to begin with. It's hard to make sense of how much of this crap is a result of the "muslim ban" and how much of it is business as usual that's being reported on as a result of the "Muslim ban."
For whatever reason, nobody has brought up the actual thought processes of the people who support this ban. My understanding of the arguments is this:
1. too many terrorist attacks in the U.S. have been committed by people born overseas
2. many come from certain "bad actor" or otherwise dysfunctional countries; that they are majority-Muslim is true but it's an incidental fact, not the reason, which is international terrorism
3. the visa vetting process is therefore dysfunctional
4. so the U.S. should pause the visa process for countries referenced in point 2 until point 3 is resolved; it's better to be safe than sorry with respect to point 1
It's my understanding that the comparison to Obama is to support that point 2 isn't about being racist but about practical national security concerns that Obama shared. The difference with Obama's policy is a difference in the degree of concern, not type of concern. That is, if Trump is really racist here, then Obama's at least a little racist, which doesn't seem to be the contention of most people appalled by this executive order.
...that's my understanding of the thought process translated into HN-friendly lingo, anyway.
In case anyone was wondering about point 1, there have been three terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11 perpetrated by immigrants from countries on the list, with zero deaths.
I love this article, because we have to remind people that Americans have been afraid of Italians and Germans and Swedes and Jews and the Japanese and Muslims and the Chinese and DEFINITELY the Irish at one time or another.
Established groups feared new groups. But in the end, these people generally brought new innovations and economic growth and interesting new foods.
They mashed new cultures with old - not without pain - and eventually gave us General Tso's Chicken.
In other words, it's gonna be alright.
^^ this is what I tell people who support Muslim bans. I'm not sure if it helps them, but it helps me.
I don't know how well it works on Trump supporters, but there's something that bugs me about this argument. It seems to take a moral issue (do you treat other people well?), and replace it with an economic issue (do you know of inventions, food, or some economic benefit from those people?). I feel like it's a racing certainty that many Italian-Americans lived ordinary lives, and didn't do anything out of the ordinary—it's a quality shared by the vast majority of all people regardless of their origins. Shouldn't that be okay too? Otherwise, how important would someone have to be? Can we use binary search to find out?
If one can't successfully appeal to someone's sense of morality (perhaps because they have different morals), one can try to appeal to their sense of self interest.
This one, uh, I point-blank refuse to believe. The moral principles about how you can treat other people are so widespread and uniform (made it into the bloody bible, even; the only bit that everybody knows from that MLK speech is about this), that you're gonna have some serious convincing to do, before I believe that people "have different morals". It seems more believable that people have just the same morals they always did, but are applying them very selectively without proper justification (as it always is with prejudice).
And in getting them to apply morality in a more uniform matter, sometimes it's easier to address morality by way of self-interest than morality directly. Getting someone to acknowledge than a random Iranian being allowed in the country will not cause buildings to falls is a good thing, and whether it's achieved by appealing to their morality or their self-interest it's still a good thing.
People's answers to things like the trolly problem says we do have different morals and the way you frame a question has a lot to do with what we think is moral.
Believe what you want, different people believe in some fundamentally different things. Go hang out on Breitbart, and see if you still feel the way you do.
By the way, I think you're right. The moral argument is stronger than the economic one. And among another crowd, I would probably lead with moral.
That said, there is no need to only have one argument, they can both stand together.
As best I can tell, we have no moral obligation to let every person into the United States, but we have an economically-sound reason for accepting a steady stream of new folks.
Maybe a better question to ask is why those groups have not been afraid of others at any point? If true, what makes Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, Japanese, Muslims, Chinese and the Irish not engage in bigotry and hatred of others. Come to think of it isn't that a sizable segment of the world population? And if so maybe the remaining segment(s) need to be identified better.
At least half of the groups you listed are well known as not exactly being tolerant to others, even today. Put in historical perspective and pretty much all of them were part of the world that "engage in bigotry and hatred of others".
Follow this through, and you find that racism is inherent in culture. The dominant culture uses race in order to oppress and scapegoat the minority culture, pretty much everywhere.
This doesn't make it okay, of course. This means we need to be that much more conscious of it, and take active steps to mitigate the effects of racism. (This is the distinction between "I'm not a racist" and anti-racism, btw)
In the long run, sure. But in the short run, were there Irish gangs, German mafia &c.? Were those forms of criminality different from the forms prevalent amonst ethnic-English Americans of the same time period? I honestly don't know.
What sort of social upheaval and strife occurred along the way to assimilation? In the long run, things might be okay, but how much pain will there be along the way?
Stop fearmongering and implying immigrants are naturally criminals.
Criminality us a result of being marginalized from society and not being able to work "honest" livings. You are forced to rely on your own group, pushed to the edges and fighting for its own.
I researched this some after Trump's executive order, and it is interesting because most people know about the Japanese internment because it was the largest, but we also interned Italians and Germans. These three groups were also prohibited from buying certain items that could potentially be used in sabotage.
Nations have commonly interned enemy aliens, e.g. P.G. Wodehouse. However, one hell of a lot of the "Japanese" interned were in fact native-born citizens.
My German-born great-grandparents were not molested by the government during WW I, though there was harassment of Germans and German-speakers. And in WW II the US had admirals and generals with names like Nimitz, Eisenhower, Eichelberger, Gerow.
Counterpoint: my German great-grandparents and their relatives were interred by the US during WWII. They lost most of their possessions, just like the Japanese prisoners.
> By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans.
These scientists were 'pseudo' only in retrospect. It literally took a world war to knock eugenicists out of the mainstream.
As we pat ourselves on the back today for being so rational and enlightened, we would do well to remember episodes like that and restore some sense of humility. The progressives of that era considered themselves no less enlightened and rational than we do ourselves.
To their credit, race was thought of differently before the discovery of the double helix. It was only until the 70s that people commonly believed that Neanderthals became white people because their bones were discovered in Europe, and that Homo Erectus created the Asian "race" because their bones were discovered in Asia.
Nowadays race more often means skin color and a deterministic culture, with the occasional addition of crude metrics such as IQ to justify preexisting biases.
Just to be clear, this was not a small group of pseudo intellectuals. Eugenics was applauded almost universally by Progessives and Conservatives among others. Included we can count J. Maynard Keynes, Irving Fischer ('prevention of breeding of the worst'), Gunnar Myrdal (economics Nobel Prize) Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, Sidney Webb and Julian Huxley, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and dozens of other famous names. You can say that eugenics was 'received opinion' in that era.
Very true. While postmodernist philosophy is often denounced for its embrace of relativism the implicit aversion to moral absolutes, I would argue that it's the inevitable reaction to an excess of certitude during the modernist period and the resultant atrocities. This has a philosophical parallel in the excess of certitude afforded by religion. I'm arguing not that religion or science or political ideologies are inherently violent , but that once the tenets of a belief are accorded axiomatic status, an epistemological break with reality occurs and the fanatical response to the cognitive dissonance that inevitably results is to attempt to bring reality into line with the subjective belief.
This is well summarized by cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek; if you have Netflix then I heartily recommend watching the whole of this film there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37RLn28mrLU
Of course nobody is immune from this. I have subjective beliefs that I treat as axiomatic and I'm sure Zizek does too; it would be hard to get through the day if you weren't able to take anything for granted. But when we are engaged in philosophical thought, we should seek to minimize the axiomatic content of our argument and be clear about our reasons for designating some subjective beliefs as axiomatic. I believe strongly in a natural right of self-defense, for example. To justify this (to myself, not necessarily to anyone else), I observe that in nature, when animals or even plants are attacked and there is no possibility of evading the attack, they attempt to retaliate in some fashion in hopes of causing their antagonist to break off the attack. Of course I could be falling victim to a naturalistic fallacy here, and indeed there's a strong argument in western culture that the willing sacrifice of the individual self in pursuit of some collective good is a more effective strategy than direct confrontation; however the utilitarian argument for this course is predicated on the existence of an afterlife - if not in the sense of a physical heaven and hell, then in the sense of a collective memory of the sacrifice which informs the future behavior of the collective organism.
This too is an axiomatic belief for many people, but it in turn is subject to question; one might argue that is the death of ~6 million Jewish people during the Holocaust, most of whom went to their deaths compliantly rather than confrontationally is the largest identifiable sacrifice in accordance with a general principle of non-violence, how is it that only a few generations later anti-semitism has become fashionable once more, and there is a social contingent eager to resume such genocidal activities under the auspices of some warmed-over conjectures about racial superiority. Insofar as there's a conflict between the natural instinct to retaliate (which may or may not scale) and the social imperative to sacrifice oneself (which may or may not improve the strategic position of the embattled social group) I lean towards the natural instinct because it's the product of millions of years of evolutionary competition vs. thousands of years of social cooperation, but I feel like it would be a mistake to uncritically adopt either position as the correct one and then never question it again.
This may seem very abstract and intangible when I express it in philosophical terms, but given the high level of political polarization and the various socioeconomic and geopolitical circumstances that obtain today, we are or soon will be forced to make decisions on the basis of such fundamental beliefs and then live or die with the consequences. I claim, therefore, that an examination of our fundamental beliefs and the means by which we qualify them is a matter of grave urgency, because under sufficient stress we default to acting without thinking, and those actions are the products of the beliefs that we choose to hold.
Thank you for pointing this out. This was "settled science" of the day and to question it put one against much of the world scientific community. Just as a flat earth and an Earth-centric universe were once completely accepted without question, so was this.
And today, in our age of satellites and electronic computers, we have our own misconceptions - areas where nagging little doubts or details that don't quite fit the model (and are therefore trivialized or ignored outright). Examples: The unidirectional linearity of time. String Theory vs classical quantum model. Or even the "big bang" model. Our (lack of) understanding gravity and quantum entanglement.
Hopefully future generations with more understanding will look back at us, shake their heads, and ask "how could they have been so naive?"
I think the answer is, we're really not that far removed from our ancestors scratching the dirt with sticks and learning to control fire. Hopefully with continued inspection (introspection?) we get closer to the truth of science and its beauty.
American and German eugenicists were in close contact with each other, especially after World War I: they were working together in international organizations, following and even reporting on developments in eugenics in each other's countries. The Germans did, in fact, borrow much of their 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring (the so-called 'sterilization law') from the model sterilization law drawn up for the various states by Harry H. Laughlin, Superintendent of the ERO, and a number of American eugenicists were impressed with the Nazi eugenical laws after 1933.
Another dimension to consider in this is to be careful in how we demonize the Anti-Evolution people from this time in history as well. I do believe that William Jennings Bryan of the Scopes Monkey Trial was a very ignorant man in many regards, but the textbook he was protesting was horrifying in for they way it promoted eugenics. I wrote about this here after listening to a presentation from an anthropologist on the subject, who argued that Bryan--a liberal Christian--was strongly motivated by his opposition to eugenics:
In lessons learned from history, Jennings made the mistake of attacking the textbook on the validity of evolutionary theory instead of for the abhorrent promotion of eugenics. As a result, history remembers him as a buffoon rallying against a now-obvious scientific truth. I see a parallel today with many Climate Change denialists, who attack the science instead of attacking the policies being put forward using the science for support.
> It literally took a world war to knock eugenicists out of the mainstream.
That was still pretty mainstream post-WWII in the US. And of course it's undergoing a renaissance as "race realism".
> As we pat ourselves on the back today for being so rational and enlightened, we would do well to remember episodes like that and restore some sense of humility. The progressives of that era considered themselves no less enlightened and rational than we do ourselves.
Aren't these issues exactly why modern progressives tend to be wary of cultural absolutism and monocultures?
My great-uncle was one of them. A second-generation immigrant, his father forbade any utterance of Italian in his household. But my great-uncle - born American - nontheless dealt with discrimination, and so he went a step further and changed his Italian name to Bill Morgan.
Bill loved his country so much that when he failed the physical for the OSS - already an army captain - by being legally blind in one eye, he lied and cheated his way into a formal position helping the British train resistance fighters in Europe. He was just as conniving when he convinced his superiors to give him a mission to parachute behind enemy lines and lead a unit of French resistance fighters.
He made a career with the CIA. Even in the letter he gave me when I was born (he died before I met him), he described in great detail need to be fit in mind and body to serve your country.
He's buried in Arlington. So much for a threat to homeland security.
If anyone is interested, he documented his experiences of WWII in an exciting book, "The OSS and I." It's hard not to enjoy a book with a chapter titled: "How to blow up a bridge."
This is heavily stereotypical, but you can judge the loyalty of an Italian-American with just two questions:
Where does your mother live?
What's your favorite [sports] team?
If mom lives in the US, and the team plays baseball, NFL or NCAA football, or NBA or NCAA basketball, you could probably hand over the nuclear launch codes. If mom lives in Naples, and the team plays Euro-soccer, you'd better keep an eye on that guy. If mom lives in Windsor, Ontario, and the team is the Blue Jays, the test is inconclusive.
Nice thoughts, but none of the groups you mentioned in your analogy have the worldwide penchant for terrorism that Muslim groups do. Berlin, Brussels, New York, Israel, Orlando, etc.
Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Japanese didn't immigrate to other countries and slaughter its citizens.
I understand the tiny minority is the problem; just don't think your analogy to these other groups is an apt one.
> Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Japanese didn't immigrate to other countries and slaughter its citizens.
Neither do Muslims? I mean, show me the statistics that show that they have a higher terrorism rate than other groups. The IRA, the extremist christian groups, and the mentally ill all do a lot of damage as well, but they're not being banned from the USA. I think Muslims get targeted by the media because they're different looking, and so they get reported on more thoroughly.
I could very well be wrong, but I honestly don't believe they are statistically more prone to terrorism.
Overall numbers are hard to come by, especially for smallish incidents, but of the 23 acts of terrorism in 2016 killing a hundred or more people, 100% of them were done by Muslims.
Were there countries with huge numbers of extremely violent mentally ill people, I have no doubt the US would limit or halt immigration from those places.
There are huge numbers of radical or radical-sympathetic Muslims. If you have an open mind, I suggest getting a Muslim's take on the actual numbers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSPvnFDDQHk (warning, has numbers, may not be PC)
It's fine to support open immigration, but denying that there is an unusual problem with violence in the Muslim community is indefensible.
Well, it depends on your point. Your point seemed to be that Arab Muslims are uniquely violent, that terrorism is their own thing. Look at the 1970s, and you see plenty of terrorism from Europeans.
I don't know about the Irish in particular, but the list of links you've presented --- sorted by casualties, on a year-by-year basis --- makes a powerful case for the diversity of terrorist attacks in the 1970s. It doesn't well support an argument that terrorism is somehow endemic to specific ethnicities.
>all but one of which were part of the civil wars in Iraq or Syria.
Unsurprisingly all sides in a muslim majority country's civil war are muslim, equally unsurprising is that the non-recognized-states action are written down as terrorism.
I notice that reading that link, 22/23 acts of terrorism killing a hundred people or more happened in Iraq and Syria which is literally a war-zone.
Just as a thought experiment, if you listed civilian casualties in the Ukraine-Russia war as deaths from terroristic acts you could easily come to the conclusion that it was Eastern-European Christians that were the world's greatest terrorists.
The Bible and Quran share the same DNA. There's no difference between any type of religious extremism, just as there's no difference between any group of humans. The difference is context, and in the case of the Middle East the socioeconomic context is crushingly awful. Much of this (shoutouts to the Hypernomalization mention above, which I can't seem to reply to, excellent documentary) is even a result of more powerful, "Christian" nations.
Members of "minority religions" in their country of origin are eligible for waivers of the bans issued in the EO. Trump has specifically said that Christians would be a priority.
> That wouldn't make sense anyway...how would they prove their Christianity?
Whether it would make sense or not is irrelevant to whether it is actually part of the policy.
We don't need Internet message board speculation as to why the order was worded the way it was. The reason is that Giuliani suggested that particular language to try to make the executive order a "legal Muslim ban". This has been widely reported on--in fact, it was front page news a week ago.
The issue with terrorism isn't the body count. Its all the destabilizing damage people do to themselves in response out of fear. Look at all this chaos over such a tiny body count.... its dumb, imo.
> but of the 23 acts of terrorism in 2016 killing a hundred or more people, 100% of them were done by Muslims.
From your link, 100% of those killing 100+ are done by the islamic state militants who are fighting what they consider to be a civil war.
If you cannot manage to see the distinction in that, then you don't really have an open mind about this discussion.
> It's fine to support open immigration, but denying that there is an unusual problem with violence in the Muslim community is indefensible.
Being scared shitless of over 1.5 billion people just because some of them are bad people, is just ridiculous. There isn't a problem with violence in the Muslim community. Go to any Muslim community not in the middle of a war, and I doubt you'll find more violence than you do in your average Jewish or Christian community.
I spot-checked the stats you linked to, and 100% of the "acts of terrorism" in which 100 or more people were killed were committed by paramilitary groups like ISIS and the Taliban, and took place outside the US.
Those are horrific acts, but IMO are more akin to the US' behaviour in Vietnam, or Blackwater contractors in Iraq. Would you support a ban on Americans travelling to other countries because of those events?
The main focus of the documentary compares the styles of Trump and Vladimir Poutine, but has interesting recap/point of view on the evolution of terrorism in the middle east.
(his previous documentary, Bitter Lake, was on Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia, also interesting, but the visual/narrative style kind of annoyed me)
I think it's easily misleading to look at these things only by the numbers. We need a better understanding of the background. Numbers can support your argument/context, but you need a better argument.
In my opinion it's one thing to acknowledge that Islamic terrorism is an issue; it is another to hand-wave this into an entire billion strong community with a simplistic framing.
Fitting a United States perspective into your criteria seems difficult. Using this Wikipedia reference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States), there have been only three terrorist incidents in the United States that have killed more than 100 people. One was September 11th (Islamic extremists). The second was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (right-wing extremist). The third, curiously enough, appears to be Mormon militias (the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre). Note, the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 could possibly fall in this category depending on the death estimate. A rather oddball collection there, not enough to generalize for sure.
Recent terrorist incidents in the United States with >=10 deaths have been biased towards Islamic terrorism, sure. However, going back to 2001, the perpetrators were: a person born to Afghan immigrants in the US (Pulse nightclub shooting); a Pakistani couple, one a US citizen and one a permanent resident (San Bernardino); a person born to Palestinian immigrants (Fort Hood); an African American who converted to the Nation of Islam (Beltway shootings); and September 11th (15 from Saudi Arabia, 2 from the UAE, 1 from Egypt, 1 from Lebanon).
Aside from September 11th, all of these incidents involve US citizens. And even if in the greatest of stretches we include the nationality of the parents, it is worth noting that (including September 11th) none of the nationalities that committed these terrorist acts are on Trump's 7 country travel restriction list.
By something like an order of magnitude, more people are killed annually by armed toddlers in the US than by radical Islamist foreign nationals. Both Islamists and toddlers take a back seat to the nationwide vending machine threat --- vending machines can be counted on in 2017 to kill enough Americans to justify a travel ban on all employees of the Coca Cola and Frito Lay corporations.
I fear you many have selected the wrong forum to litigate this argument in. The deeper we dig into the facts behind the argument you're trying to make, the (rapidly) less credible that argument is going to become. You might have more luck with it on Facebook.
Fun fact: the vast majority of North American terrorism is committed by white men. No other group since 9/11 has contributed more to terror than disgruntled white dudes in North America. Refugees are trying to escspe the same horrors you are describing. The situation is similar to the US turning away Jews under the banner of "America First" during WW2 because they feared Nazis sneaking in with the Jews. The "safe" countries you describe haven't been rocked by war, their national identities not torn down and confused by decades of installed dictators, foreign resource exploitation, and post-cold-war rebel group armings. Remember, we created the Taliban to fight the Russians. That one sure had some long lasting effects. Now we're empowering neo-nazis domestically to fight this perceived threat of Muslim people. How do you think this is going to play out when we're done being afraid of Muslims?
It's easy to be scared right now, but turning to racist rhetoric instead of finding parallels in history is what allows fascism to take hold. Read up, educate yourself, and come back tomorrow better ready for building a better tommorrow.
15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. The current ban would have done nothing to prevent them from coming here.
I could see a ban making some sense, but any ban that leaves out Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia has deficiencies so glaring that it would never be worth the suffering caused.
Considering your views towards Muslims and willingness to ignore vast amounts of domestic terrorism, it seems like the goals of the 9/11 hijackers has been acheived.
9/11 is a valid date to start from because a large part of its shock value is that for the most part of post WW2 America, there weren't any foreign attacks on American soil. 9/11 was the anomaly, meant to provoke US outrage and further our violence against the middle East, convincing more young people that the US was an agressor and that they were the righteous. Clearly, these people are not righteous, but neither were we.
Prior to 9/11, the all-time US terrorist record was the Oklahoma City bombing, by two white dudes. Divide out the number of deaths in each attack by the number of people directly involved in the attacks, and you reach comparable numbers.
"The 1909 murder of Elsie Sigel in New York, of which a Chinese person was suspected, was blamed on the Chinese in general and led to physical violence. "The murder of Elsie Sigel immediately grabbed the front pages of newspapers, which portrayed Chinese men as dangerous to "innocent" and "virtuous" young white women. This murder led to a surge in the harassment of Chinese in communities across the United States."" - from the Wikipedia article "Anti-Chinese Sentiment in the United States"
The article goes on to talk about the "yellow peril" theory, in which scholars believed that "China, India, Japan and Korea were attacking England and the U.S., but that Jesus Christ would stop them"
I'll also point out that one of the final pardons of President Obama was of a Puerto Rican nationalist who led the FALN, a group that executed multiple bombings in major US cities in the 1970's.
So your allegation that the linkage of Muslims to terrorist extremism is unique is provably untrue.
> portrayed Chinese men as dangerous to "innocent" and "virtuous" young white women
Suspecting a group of criminal activity is hardly terrorism; you could have just quoted attitudes towards blacks for a less obscure analogy.
> So your allegation that the linkage of Muslims to terrorist extremism is unique is provably untrue.
I never said that no other group has ever been linked to terrorism. I said it hasn't ever been close to the scale it is now, with major attacks in every culture across dozens of countries. Comparing IRA to ISIS is a big stretch, not in type but in magnitude.
> I never said that no other group has ever been linked to terrorism. I said it hasn't ever been close to the scale it is now, with major attacks in every culture across dozens of countries.
Actually, it was far worse (and more coordinated, backed by—among others—both major superpowers) during much of the Cold War, it's just that the armed forces using terrorism as a mechanism (especially ones successful in seizing and holding territory on the scale the "Islamic State" has) were more likely to be popularly labelled as militias or revolutionaries of whatever ideology their rhetoric focussed on (Communist, etc.) or, by governments sympathetic to their cause, simply as "freedom fighters". The ones that were labelled "terrorists" rather than other things were the ones that were comparatively unsuccessful.
And even then, there were still a number of high-profile terrorist groups around the world connected to the Cold War/anti-colonialism. The Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army, various PLO factions, the IRA, etc. In the U.S. alone there a bunch of different groups (Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, Black Liberation Army, Puerto Rican nationalists etc.).
There was also a lot of violent groups on the Right, but for whatever reason they didn't get labelled as terrorists as much and didn't seem to have the same kind of view of ideological solidarity. So the Sabra and Shatila massacre doesn't tend to get labelled a terrorist attack even though it dwarfed the actions of most of the above groups in brutality and death toll, and as far as I know there wasn't much solidarity between the Phalange and the KKK (even though they were both violent right-wing Christian groups).
Here's a list of the terrorist attacks in the UK over the past 40-odd years. You can see that up until the early 2000's, the vast, vast majority of them were perpetrated by the IRA, and the sheer number was much greater than those by Islamic extremists in current times.
My point is not that Islamist extremist terrorism is not A BAD THING that we should do our best to eliminate. It's more that we should resist the temptation to label it as a unique existential threat that justifies discrimination against an entire religion. History tells us that we've been down this path scores of times before, we've been wrong every time, and we've lived to regret our prejudice.
Italians were literally accused of terrorism. That's what "anarchism" meant in the 1920s. And just as there is today with "Radical Islamism", there was a nationwide panic about anarchism.
That seems like the opposite of the argument you're making, so not only is it relevant, but it also seems like a non-sequitur rebuttal. What am I missing?
Yeah, the Irish never did any terrorism worldwide; no gun-running, dealing in explosives, managing international supply networks from Palestine to the US... none of that, totally. Same for the Germans and absolutely my fellow Italians - if we ever did that, there would be books and movies all over! The Japanese absolutely never moved to mainland Asia with bellicose intents, and the Swedes never imposed themselves over their Baltic neighbours, and of course there was never any violence by the zionist movement that brought about Israel.
Oh and you should totally compare local ethnicities with a worldwide religious community of billions, that's totally the right thing to do.
I'm from Sweden, we actually have quite the reputation for slaughter:
- The case has been made that the Gothic tribe who sacked Rome originated from Sweden
- The Vikings pillaged and slaughtered in Russia, Britain, Continental Europe, the Mediterranean, even as far as Newfoundland
- During the Swedish Empire, Sweden colonized and occupied Finland and the Baltic states, and waged war on Continental Europe, conquering half of the Holy Roman Empire
- During the same period Sweden built forts in West Africa, I can tell you what they did there was not always pretty
- Under king Charles XII, Sweden waged war in first Russia, then Ukraine, then the Ottoman Empire, soundly defeated there tried to invade Norway
- Norway was invaded again and this time conquered in 1808, taking it as compensation for the loss of Finland to Russia in the Napoleonic wars
Now, that's just Sweden. Let's not mention Italy (Ethiopia, anyone), Germany (...) and Japan (oh boy).
I don't know exactly why users flagged it, but many did. One possibility is that you've made a bold and controversial claim without accompanying evidence. That sort of thing predictably impedes our ability to have the kind of civil and thoughtful discussion that we're here for.
> Nice thoughts, but none of the groups you mentioned in your analogy have the worldwide penchant for terrorism that Muslim groups do. Berlin, Brussels, New York, Israel, Orlando, etc.
This is called the availability bias - you're correlating the tendency of a group to take certain actions with the ease of which you can think of examples of members of that group taking those actions.
If I can think of an equal number of examples of Christian (or Jewish or Eskimo) terrorists, then by your logic we should be equally suspicious of those groups.
Irish, italians, russians, jews, chinese, japanese... is there a group that america hasnt at some time feared? Did canadians get thier turn?
Having a guilty and irrational fear of some group, whatever the group, seems almost part of american identity. I cannot think of any period of american history that wasnt steeped in such fears.
Gays+aids? Urban black "super predators? Werent the 90s the height of white-flight and the bussing debates? Perhaps thats a different type, an internal fear.
Perhaps the post-apollo 70s? Americans then feared nuclear war generally, but not russians as a people. Racism was a thing internally, but i cannot think of an especially hated outside group.
"We unambiguously won WWII. Back then the 'greatest generation' knew what was needed to win a war, and wasn't squeemish about doing what needed to be done. WWII was the last major war we actually won. Since then we have become too politically correct to actually win wars. Trump will change that. We will win again."
I like this article because it reminds us that "whiteness" is not actually a strictly racial identity. There are numerous factors that make someone "white" in America, which makes them acceptable to white nationalists. These purity rules can change over time to represent what's politically expedient.
Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on.
This is one of the primary reasons that fascism is such an uncomfortable situation for its citizens. Fascism thrives in the face of an "enemy" that can be defeated by force and a "strong leader." These enemies will be selected by convenience, not rationality.
>Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on.
This was parodied in the movie Blazing Saddles, set in the American wild west, with a quote that I'd be [edit: apparently not] banned for repeating verbatim.
Mel Brooks is probably our greatest American comedy director and writer, at least in the second half of the 20th century he's in the top handful. Who comes to mind, Blake Edwards?
I sincerely hope that posting such a quote isn't cause for a ban - since it's pulled directly from the film, and does a good job of emphasizing the point you're trying to make.
There's also a scene in The Sopranos that covers this. Tony is talking with his therapist and they basically come to the conclusion that he thinks Italians aren't white and won't ever be truly accepted by what I think he called "Mayonnaise Americans" (basically WASPs). Growing up in a large Italian family there was definitely some family members that felt this way as well, particularly the older ones.
Even in Europe, we Italians often carry an inferiority complex towards our Northern neighbours, historically reinforced by the wealth gap that started accumulating since the Industrial Revolution.
To me that read as a rhetorical flourish and not a genuine concern about moderation. Ironically, the zeal with which it's being interpreted as a live concern sort of makes its own point. :)
I can't speak for the HN mods, but I am fine with seeing offensive words here when they are employed in a documentary rather than a pejorative sense.
Let's examine a few examples, using 'oompa-loompa' as an imaginary term of abuse. Shut up Alice, you're just an oompa-loompa! - not OK. Ignore Alice; she's a stupid oompa-loompa. - not OK. Bob denigrated Alice by referring to her as an 'oompa-loompa.' - OK.
It's not the specific words that are offensive, but the context in which they are employed. When you're reporting someone else's speech, it's OK to quote them accurately and in full - indeed I think it's often necessary. If we use euphemisms or bowdlerisms - such as saying 'the f-word' or 'f---' to avoid saying the word 'fuck' when reporting what someone said - the we are not only insulting the intelligence of our interlocutors, but we are softening the impact of the original statement. To do so out of a regard for the tender feelings of others is misplaced, because by implication we're saying that the offensive content inheres in the word rather than intention of the speaker, and the use of offensive words is easily dismissed nowadays by someone saying they 'misspoke'.
Let's take another example. Bob says to Alice: 'Your life is unimportant because you are only an oompa-loompa' in some public confrontation. Carol reports this on the evening news as 'bob said that Alice's life was not important, and employed an ethnic slur.' Technically true, but 'employed an ethnic slur' sounds pretty mild compared to the unpleasant experience of being called an oompa-loompa directly, or feeling empathy for someone subjected to such a term of abuse. By resorting to euphemism, the offensive nature of Bob's aggressive remarks towards Alice is significantly understated, which is a win for bob.
I think that when a public figure (qua someone whose utterances or actions are consequential because of their social reach) makes an offensive remarks such as 'You know what? fuck the oompa=loompas!' it should be reported verbatim on the evening news, not bleeped or euphemized. There's an argument that doing so spreads it and normalizes, it, and that is true to some extent. (There are increasingly common reports, albeit apocryphal, of school students excusing offensive or assaultive behavior by citing the President's well-documented model). But the unpleasantness of hearing that repeated and perpetuated has to be balanced against the value of people knowing exactly what was said and how it was said, so that the fact of offensive or assaultive behavior is not obscured to the end of deniability or dismissability.
Linguistic infantilization is but a prelude to cognitive manipulation, and the latter has reached pandemic proportions in an age of almost-instant global communication. The averred reluctance of some to be exposed to horrible words is really a plea not to be informed about the existence of horrible behavior, a preference for not knowing about the fact of conflict. Meaningful discourse on how we should behave is impossible if we cannot express ourselves honestly about how we do behave.
First, the article doesn't discuss 'whiteness', so your comment is something of an irrelevant narrative imposition.
Second, it's intellectually dishonest to imply that this had anything to do with a malleable concept of race. Italy and the US were at war during WW2, and the additional scrutiny was very clearly based upon ancestral nationality, rather than ethnic, lines.
Obviously the war is a big part of this, but the article makes it clear that wasn't the only factor. Right near the beginning:
> Italian-Americans had faced prejudice for decades by the time the order was drafted, says Guglielmo. Italians were the biggest group of immigrants to the United States who passed through Ellis Island for much of the late 19th and early 20th century; between 1876 and 1930, 5 million Italians moved to the U.S. Not without backlash: By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans.
> First, the article doesn't discuss 'whiteness', so your comment is something of an irrelevant narrative imposition.
It discusses "outsider" status, and WW2 represented a massive debate about who was "trustworthy." Historians have pointed out that in many cases these camp approaches were in part appeasement tactics for the rather large fascist movements growing in America. Hell, WW2 was the mark of the last unsuccessful kleptocrat-fascist coup against America lead by the leadership of Chase Manhattan bank in concert with the actual German nazis. It nearly happened, too!
"Whiteness" is A Word for it that fascists don't like, in part because it speaks to their "white homeland" ideology. I rather enjoy using it to point out the other side of what they're polishing is in fact a turd.
> Second, it's intellectually dishonest to imply that this had anything to do with a malleable concept of race. Italy and the US were at war during WW2,
AND YET! Mysteriously! Japanese were specifically targeted for the harshest treatment, Italians the second most, and the fewest German Americans ended up in concentration camps. What's more, it "wasn't about race" but the principle tie for many of these people to these camps was their heritage and if their looks conformed to a stereotype!
Like you yourself said:
> and the additional scrutiny was very clearly based upon ancestral nationality, rather than ethnic, lines.
Honestly, what the hell do YOU think this means? If someone looked the part, as defined by their "ancestral heritage" they had their property seized and their entire families put into war-crime level imprisonment.
And you're going to say, "This isn't about race, it's about ancestral heritage." This just in: That's one of the primary components of race and the racist discourse in America. How many times did we see the Trump campaign supporters point out that if only 3rd greater generation Americans voted, the RNC would win the presidency every time?
You are eager to call it "intellectually dishonest" and maybe that'll work in your christian-sponsored micro-targetted facebook ads and now-banned subreddits. For everyone not looking for an enemy to blame it's the observable and objective facts. None of the concentration camps America set up were fun places, but the ones for the least white-looking people were objectively horrifying, and the seizure of property against that class of people was much more widespread and damaging. More asian-looking people were dissipated than every other category combined.
> AND YET! Mysteriously! Japanese were specifically targeted for the harshest treatment, Italians the second most, and the fewest German Americans ended up in concentration camps.
Practically speaking, it would be difficult to round up all German-Americans and put them into concentration camps in WW2. They had basically interbred with other people with dissimilar European ancestry, did not retain any unique accent, or group themselves into ethnic communes.
Additionally, many believed that by fighting against Germany in World War 1, all German-American's had proved their loyalty beyond any more doubt.
Lastly, Germany had its greatest waves of immigration to the America's either before the US was even a nation, or during its infancy.
Italians were a 'new' wave of immigration, pushed into ghettos due to existing social bigotry, and easily differentiated from the normal phenotypic blend of older immigrant populations that became the white American norm.
----
Personally, I believe that this is better stated as ethnic discrimination. In Europe, Africa, and Asia---all 'old world' continents---there is less of a tendency to trumpet ones own race. Rather people have the view that their ethnicity is the best, their bloodline lineage is the best, their family heritage is the best. Discrimination there takes the form of Germany believing that anyone who isn't german is low-class---which includes Spaniards, Italians, British, Russians, Poles, Finns, etc.
In the US today, ethnicity has been de-emphasized with a greater focus being put on race and religion, which is to our detriment in understanding both historical treatment of immigrants, and also current day treatment of immigrants.
For example: why are so many people against Syrians, but view Saudi's as tolerable? Why is Yemen seen less favourable than Oman?
> Additionally, many believed that by fighting against Germany in World War 1, all German-American's had proved their loyalty beyond any more doubt.
I'd love to see a source for this. My research and interviewing my relatives who were there suggested that they were quite concerned that the germans were "hard to spot".
> Italians were a 'new' wave of immigration, pushed into ghettos due to existing social bigotry, and easily differentiated from the normal phenotypic blend of older immigrant populations that became the white American norm.
I mean it wasn't _that_ new. There was a major wave of immigration in 1910.
But bigotry based on appearance is almost always the basis of this.
Your argument fails, because Italians obviously weren't the only ethnicity now considered "white" and formerly considered not. The US has never been at war with Ireland, but white America's rejection of the Irish is so well-known it forms the basis for one of the most famous Simpsons jokes.
Your argument is basically that if the word doesn't appear in the original article, we should be able to hold a discussion of that concept that refers to the article. There is a lot more to reading comprehension than iterating over a bag of words to see whether they appear in a given corpus.
As a <White>Italian</White>, I surely feel demonized by the Guardian style of 'journalism' and American leftists. Too bad no one is calling them out. I guess Fascist tendencies too are acknowledged out of convenience, not rationality.
It may be true that "shame only works inasmuch as you believe folks have a point" (I'm unsure), but it's certainly not true that shame only works when the folks doing the shaming have a point. People often feel shame when people criticize qualities that they do have that I think we'd both agree are not shameworthy. As well, some people have a tendency to, when they see criticism of a vaguely-specified group to which it is remotely plausible that they are included in, include themselves in the criticized group and feel shame as a result.
These objections do not necessarily imply that we should not attempt to publicly shame shameworthy behavior, but such tactics do harm some people who are guiltless (unless "guilt" here is intended to include feeling a sense of guilt without having actually done something wrong, in which case the statement seems tautological) and guileless. So does asserting that they don't in a public setting like this, independently of whether the particular individual the assertion is deployed against is themselves worthy of disapproval.
You don't have to agree with 'KirinDave's comment, but to express that disagreement on HN, you have basically two options:
1. You can write a civil rebuttal that uses evidence to dismantle the point he's trying to make.
2. You can downvote him.
What you should not do is write a comment like this, where you vent emotionally without providing anything for anyone to grasp onto or respond to. Those kinds of comments get flagged (by clicking the timestamp on the comment, revealing the "Flag" button).
To clarify: I've been a Guardian reader for years (as well as other moderate outlets) and used to share a few of its stances, until 2 ~ 3 years ago. Now white people, especially men, have become the modern enemy KirinDave was talking about. From silly to major issues of society, they are the convenient culprit to win over voters. Yet, such racial discrimination is accepted and normalized. The leftist youth of US is growing intolerant, righteous and prone to violence. My overseas friends' feeds were filled with academic excuses for blurting antiwhite racism and subtle calls for violence.
I can only share a narrow/biased point of view. Data over time will eventually confirm/deny my impressions.
> From silly to major issues of society, they are the convenient culprit to win over voters
What. What?
Okay the last 2 years of political history have been a major, successful backlash by white men. Donald Trump won the election largely by the white vote. Brexit is happening largely due to the British brand of white identity politics.
> Yet, such racial discrimination is accepted and normalized.
What the heck are you talking about? White people and in particular white men still dominate the capital of a very large portion of the world. They're still over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in the US. They're still receiving more leniancy for crimes than equivalent socioeconomic substitutes that are non-white.
Are you mad because people notice this and are frustrated with the pace of change in your Facebook feed? Are you mad because you're confusing that gentle pressure with an actual injustice?
Radicalizing the American population and fostering identity division for the sake of votes and views is not a gentle pressure. Being against Trump is not mutually exclusive to holding media accountable. Lastly, Declaring Positive statistics, like you did, does not offset discriminatory attitudes.
> White people and in particular white men still dominate the capital of a very large portion of the world.
Does this fact make slandering any better? what's the minimum economic divide that gives me a free pass over hate speech?
> They're still over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in the US.
The Japanese are over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in Japan. The Chinese are over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in China. US is majority white, plus there's a constant flux of people from Europe. People of different cultures, but mostly sharing the same skin color. US is also leading the efforts toward more diversity.
> They're still receiving more leniancy for crimes than equivalent socioeconomic substitutes that are non-white.
Statistics alone don't tell us the reason why. But you should try going from prison to prison to teach white inmates about their privilege. And, again, poor white people are not fed and sheltered by magic of statistical average.
> Are you mad because people notice this and are frustrated with the pace of change in your Facebook feed?
I'm afraid people think physical violence is something to be celebrated and used against political opponents. But your condescending tone is not worthy of further discussion.
> Radicalizing the American population and fostering identity division for the sake of votes and views is not a gentle pressure.
I'm not sure that anyone is "radicalizing" the population anymore than it already is. America has had a small but vocal radical left for a long time.
> Does this fact make slandering any better? what's the minimum economic divide that gives me a free pass over hate speech?
I really wish I knew what you were talking about.
> The Japanese are over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in Japan. [etc]
These are unfair comparisons and you know it. I used the term "over-represented" carefully. We'd expect a regression of the workforce to something roughly approaching the actual national population averages. Instead, we do not see that at all.
> Being against Trump is not mutually exclusive to holding media accountable.
I really wish I understood even remotely what you were actually aiming at. "Holding media accountable?"
> I'm afraid people think physical violence is something to be celebrated and used against political opponents.
Okay, stop right here. Let's break this down, because I _do_ think I know what you're talking about. You're mad because #punchanazi is a thing, and because Richard Spencer has been hit twice.
Let's point two things out here:
1. In general, the protest in the US has been overwhelmingly and surprisingly peaceful with the exception of a very small number of extreme groups in the margins, _with 2 exceptions_. Both involve members of a vocal minority of people who incite violence against vulnerable people while claiming that is their ideology.
2. Richard Spencer is someone who plainly and loudly advocates for the removal of anyone who is not "white" from America, by force if necessary. He advocates the end of a free and open society to create a "white homeland." He is not a 'political opponent.' He's an advocate for the collapse of a free, democratic society into a religiously motivated fascist state.
He's a special case. And he represents a historically special case. And before you say I'm misrepresenting his case, you should listen to him talk to people who accuse him of being a fascist actor.
> But your condescending tone is not worthy of further discussion.
It's not my fault you refuse to actually mount an argument there, Red_Tarsius. Other people who are not me and lack my somewhat wry writing style have pointed out you're not bringing much to the table other than hemming and hawing about how put upon you feel and how we should all play nice with the actual nazis among us.
You call yourself "an enemy." I wonder what you think that's really like. There's a really sharp divide in my life around the things that made me feel bad and the people who genuinely hurt me for what I was. I only consider one group my enemy.
In another example of America's fluidly morphing standard of whiteness, Finns were sometimes considered Asians:
"Finns faced racial discrimination, with many people using the Finnish language as “proof” that Finns were not European and thus fair game to be subject to unfair treatment. Some argued that Finns were Asian, meaning they should be barred from citizenship under the Asian Exclusion Act of the early 1900s. The word “Finlander” was used as a slur, along with “China Swede” and “roundhead.”"
Michael does not go into the family business. He goes to war. He goes to college. He marries a 'white' wife. He wants out of the family and to become an American; in essence, he wants to become white. Even his own family refers to him as the war hero with both pride and condescension. But he's drawn back into the family, back to his father.
Bonasera, the funeral director (corpse valet): I believe in America. America has made my fortune. But when Bonasera's daughter is raped, the (white, American) police did nothing. So he goes to the Godfather for justice.
There's always a distinction between white America and Michael's immigrant Italian-ness. Even the beginning of II, young Vito is an immigrant but is drawn back into his community. Always a distinction, cultural, ethnic, generational, racial.
The Godfather really is a/the great American novel.
Interesting, I guess you have to be on the look out for some of that stuff to pick up on it. Probably some of the choices of casting and wording were based on these aspects of the book, but if you're not aware of them, they don't really stand out.
In hindsight, I guess it's obvious that Kay doesn't look like the other women in the family. As someone who considers Italians to be "white", it never really stood out to me as notable (aside from the fact that she was unfamiliar/uncomfortable with the family business). I also never would have associated going to war or going to college as rebelling against being Italian, just seemed like a normal thing for a kid to want to do. Probably you view some of these things differently if you've read the book...
"There are many reasons for the common understanding forged by Finns and Native Americans, but above all they were united by their intimate relationship with the forest. Just like the Ojibwa Finns hunted, fished and foraged. The locals also valued Finns’ handiwork skills: the ability to build a boat or carve skis. Finns learned how to cultivate maize and use medicinal herbs, among other things. In return they lent their expertise in building log cabins and weaving shoes out of birch bark."
Quite so. I recommend Colin Woodard's excellent book American Nations to anyone who wishes to understand the often-conflicting worldviews that shape the USA and which have come to transcend state borders.
I have yet to see anyone try to advance a similar line of argument citing the past or present hostility existing between the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean peoples as proof that "East Asians" don't really exist and are merely some kind of social construct--let alone with the non-obvious corollary that the peoples wrongly socially constructed as "East Asian," not really existing as such, should therefore immediately open their immigration flood gates to the swarming masses of Africa and the Middle East.
I think I characterized by analogy the argument of both the article and the grandparent quite well: "Because many Anglo-Saxons despised the Irish and Italians a century ago, white people don't really exist as anything more than a social construct (someone apparently forgot to tell the NIH, CDC, and 23andme this), and the opposition to mass immigration from Somalia, Syria, or other countries in those regions is a result of prejudice against and fear of a socially-constructed non-white 'other.'"
Where are the articles arguing that "East Asians," "Indians," "Arabs," or other racial groups are just social constructs and that these peoples consequently lack the right to control the immigration policy of their respective nation-states?
Well, the first place to look would be in ethnic studies departments, which examine (exactly* such questions. Secondly, you might want to consider that 'East Asian' works OK as a geographic descriptor, but you're assuming that a western-originated social construct of 'East Asians' is held by the people who live in that region, most of whom I think would argue that their genetic similarities are superficial, just as almost all humans have two arms and two legs etc. I could also point to the rather complex internal history of the Asian countries you mention to highlight the existence of internal disagreements in those countries about the nature of identity, but that would involve a long historical detour and a ton of background material that neither of us likely has the inclination to review.
It might be worth mentioning that I regard your view of East Asian identity as extremely simplistic partly because I'm married to an Asian person and have had a disproportionately large number of friends from that region for several decades. Your homogenous characterization of the region is superficially persuasive but falls apart as soon as you look at the history of the region in any detail.
As for lacking the right to control immigration policy (a subject that was not in discussion but which is clearly what you want to express your views about, arguments against the restrictive immigration policy that obtains in the various East Asian countries are made all the time - not on the basis of those people lacking rights of self-determination but on the basis of economic utility. Finally, you overlook the fact that the the US (where I suspect you are based and whose immigration policy you're indirectly commenting on) was, unlike the East Asian countries you mention, explicitly founded on inclusive liberal ideas (as exemplified in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence) rather than on an ethnic nationalist identity and that it's not unreasonable to evaluate US policy in the light of the assertions upon which it is nominally founded.
Ask any "East Indian" what their population and subgroups actually consist of and you will get an immediate list of subgroups, immigration history and ideological differences.
You're right that those are all equally social constructs. Same with Arabs, that's a massive group.
When someone is discriminated against with a broad brush their list of qualifications for "an ally" is often the other people equally maligned in that group, so if "Arabs" as a group talk back to discrimination against "Arabs" then that's an unsurprising development.
Then there's always the Tulsa Race Riots in which upwards of 300 people were killed while a white mob burned one of the country's wealthiest black neighborhoods to the ground while arresting thousands of black people and displacing nearly 10,000.
38 Sioux in Mankato, MN 1862. This sounds like a lynching, but it was the sanctioned by the government, so maybe it doesn't fit the definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibley_Park
Using this as a criticism of Trump's travel ban is a false equivalency.
There have literally been a rash of terrorist attacks in Europe perpetrated by radicalized Syrians, Somalians, and Iranians. Not to mention the knife attack from Somalian refugee (who was getting a free ride) at Ohio State.
Yes, being a victim of a terrorist attack is as likely as getting hit by lightning but that doesn't mean you should wrap yourself in aluminum foil and go outside in a thunderstorm. You usually protect yourself and take shelter.
Its ok to protect yourself when there is a conceivable threat.
That being said, I do feel the travel ban was hastily rolled out without much coordination and caused some people to be detained that shouldn't have been but to completely disregard the principle of it as misguided or racist in some way is just disregarding the truth of the state of world.
In fact, many pundits are saying this going to create more propaganda or create more terrorists.
First, I disagree with notion that we should care about ISIS's propaganda. People don't become terrorists because a country bans them. They become terrorists when foreign power drops bombs and puts boots on the ground in a country they feel is theirs. Others become terrorists because they are forced to or naive minded people looking for some purpose in life.
If all we care about is their propaganda we will be frozen to inaction because anything you do can be spun against you.
Furthermore, the things ISIS hates the most is the cultural imperialism imposed on them. They don't like western values and don't want to adopt any western ideas since they are a threat to the foundations of their belief system. A threat they are willing to kill for. So really you are damned if you do and damned if you don't with ISIS. It's an ugly and complicated mess and comparing to Italians or Japanese is a gross oversimplification.
The last time I looked, the perpetrators of mass casualty incidents in the US were at best only 40-50% immigrants. Even for most of the immigrants, I suspect they were radicalized subsequent to entry in the US.
The number of terrorists that the travel ban would have stopped is at best in the low single digits. It is not at all clear that the number will exceed the number of people in the US who will become radicalized due to this policy (which I would also estimate at low single digits).
I don't know how the argument that this will cause Muslims to "become radicalized" helps Muslims, at all. If there really are people who can be turned into killers with a little bit of propaganda, then scrutinizing immigrants from those countries seems prudent.
What travel ban should we enact to create common-sense protections in this country from the gathering toddler threat? In 2015, more people were shot by toddlers than by radical Islamist foreign nationals.
As a initial disclaimer, being European I'm totally in favour of gun control... which of course would solve all of these toddler's acidental killings and many of the mass shootings.
That being said, your argument is intellectually deceiving. Toddlers neither carry out acts of terrorism, neither they kill or hurt in the name of any ideology.
Terrorism by definition means to terrorise the population, not kill the greatest amount of people. Besides that, when you carry out a terrorist act in the name of some ideology, be that radical islam, white supremacy, national separatism, etc., society is called not to act upon the results of your actions but on the ideology committing the terrorist act itself. The answer to why toddlers accidentally kill people with guns is easy: they have guns available and they aren't old enough to understand what they are doing. But the answer to why do radical islamists or white supremacists kill people is all but simple.
Also as a final thought. Even inside terrorism there are degrees on morality. Sure it's bad to carry out terrorism even in the name of national identity and freedom (i.e. IRA, ETA), but at least you have a clear message on what are the terrorists' demands and how to stop it. Radical Islam (and others) don't even have these demands - unless the submission of all the western world to radical islam can be considered a valid demand.
This has become a pretty popular retort. More people are killed by cows or staplers or whatever every year. But I think it fails in two very important ways:
1. Toddlers and cows and staplers do not have the potential to destroy Midtown Manhattan. This is a different category of threat entirely.
2. We aren't robots. We're humans who have evolved in a particular set of environments and contexts to be more scared of some things than others. It's perfectly rational to try to reduce the chance of harm from certain classes of things that we happen to fear more, even if those things aren't the most harmful over all. Fear matters. Reducing fear matters. Because we're people.
You seem to think this is evidence that people just need to be educated about the relative risks. But I think it's evidence of something much deeper in the species.
And during WWI there were similar issues for ethnically-German Americans. For whatever reason, I don't know much about what the ethnic-German experience in WWII was — maybe after the first war ethnic Germans just blended into mainstream American culture.
I'm starting to think that Trump made this move partly to get his left-wing opponents to lose credibility with people in the center by doing something with (if you're generous or disinterested) plausible justification.
That is, it's clear to me that people calling this "racist" might even be correct, but it may not matter if it seems like they're calling middle America racist. That looks a lot like being understanding towards Iraqis ("I know you're not all terrorists") while being bigoted towards Americans ("You're clearly all racist!"). Anyway, once that meme (doesn't really like Americans) is implanted, then Trump takes a hit today but get some "marketing" wins in the long run when it comes to other issues coming up (Supreme Court appointments, ACA changes, etc.)
I dispute your attempt to conflate protests against Trump's ban on entry with an indictment of middle America. People who support the ban do so for a variety of reasons and are not neatly grouped in the political center as you suggest, just as people who oppose the ban do so for a variety of reasons and can not be neatly grouped on the left.
it may not matter if it seems like they're calling middle America racist
It's true that promoting such a perception would benefit the Trump administration, but as I always say to people seeking to capture some ideological territory, 'you don't speak for the American people.' At present the administration is rather overdrawn at the credibility bank.
> I dispute your attempt to conflate protests against Trump's ban on entry with an indictment of middle America.
You can refute all you want. I'm talking about real conversations I've had with real people. It looks like some Americans are hateful towards "hateful" Americans and it puts people on the defensive and pushes them away.
EDIT:
> you don't speak for the American people
Right. That's not the message that people are getting. There are lines being drawn and many decent people feel like they're being hated along with neo-nazis. That sort of visceral feeling is hard to shake off when you want to later appeal to their sense of decency when health insurance rules are being reconsidered.
Disclaimer: Maybe you (and any particular reader of this post) are an exception to the rule -- I don't know you personally. I only know the people I've personally interacted with in this whole national discussion.
> A lot seem to think Muslim immigrant|refugee == terrorist.
Some do. But some people think the U.S. never landed on the moon. That is, just like not every Muslim is a terrorist, not every person who wants change in our visa laws wants to introduce internment camps, etc.
It's fair to think the due diligence done in admitting foreign nationals has been lacking. I think this particular approach is heavy-handed and inhumane, but we're not arguing for a more humane alternative... actually, I'm not sure what we're arguing about other than people are mad and think things are really racist right now.
> I'm for the ban because I don't want them to come and kill me and my family in our sleep.
So maybe you heard "Muslims are clearly dangerous" when they meant "my government's job is to protect my family and waiting until people are dead is too late". And even if they think Muslims are more dangerous, the right response is to, empathetically, discuss facts (statistics, counterfactuals) with them. The goal is to appeal to their better nature, not to make them lose so we win. All the left-wing apoplexy and panic these days is actively harmful from that perspective.
> I blame this perception on the people who seek to profit by the general hysteria, not those manipulated by it. I am sad for the victims of it.
Me too. I think the misconceptions about Trump-voting America is the another instance of the same phenomenon. And it's no less harmful, in my mind.
Sorry for the late reply here. I fully agree that not all those who acquiesce with the travel ban are racist, and their position is further complicated by the fact that the vast majority of people in the USA know very little of immigration. I've sat in legal education classes where criminal lawyers expressed shock and amazement at their prior ignorance of the immigration system and how differently it functions from the criminal justice system. Immigration law is crazy complex and that makes it a terrible subject for trying to resolve in the format of a TV debate or something where you can otherwise assume a basic level of audience familiarity with the issue - the same reason astrophysicists argue out their disagreements via peer review rather than on Bill Nye's weekly science podcast.
It's fair to think the due diligence done in admitting foreign nationals has been lacking.
It really isn't. It takes a huge amount of vetting for a refugee to given permission to enter the USA. It's fairly easy to enter the country if you're a citizen of the EU or Japan or Canada or Australia (all of which have a good deal of socioeconomic common ground with the USA) but overall it's difficult. Visas are simply not handed out like cookies.
Some immigrants have subsequently committed crimes or even acts of terrorism within the US. but the incidence is significantly lower than that of natural-born American citizens. None of the available evidence supports the claim that there is some sort of security crisis requiring the imposition of drastic measures.
the right response is to, empathetically, discuss facts (statistics, counterfactuals) with them. The goal is to appeal to their better nature, not to make them lose so we win
I wholly agree and practice this diligently, but at some point the responsibility falls upon the listener to evaluate the information that has been provided to them and make a decision. If they just can't make up their mind for whatever reason, then chances are they'll never be politically active and investing more effort in persuading them is not an effective use of my time. If they endlessly pose counterarguments and excuses, then after a while I start to they're either arguing in bad faith or they have an position that they can't defend but don't want to give up, and it's likewise a waste of my time.
Lest this seem dismissive I'd like to point that I've been discussing politics civilly as an adult for maybe 25 years now, so if I give up on trying to persuade someone it's not from an inability to articulate an argument or an unwillingness to entertain opposing points of view.
Me too. I think the misconceptions about Trump-voting America is the another instance of the same phenomenon. And it's no less harmful, in my mind.
Get back to me when people being shot for supporting Trump without really believing in much of anything is a regular (or even an occasional) occurrence. By contrast I can point to a significant and growing death toll for acts of terrorism carried out by members of the far-right.
I'm also talking about real conversations I've had with real people, from which I've drawn different conclusions than you. You seem to think (if I've read you right) that my ideas are derived from some academic political theory, which isn't the case.
There are lines being drawn and many decent people feel like they're being hated along with neo-nazis.
No doubt, but insofar as they choose not to acknowledge the existence of neo-nazis in the face of abundant evidence or the threat such neo-nazis pose towards people they don't like, then it's not surprising that people who feel threatened by neo-nazis are going to feel similarly annoyed with those who enable them.
To my mind, this is similar to someone in the Confederacy saying that slavery wasn't a big issue because they didn't personally own any slaves. While that would certainly make them less culpable than someone who did own slaves, declining to acknowledge the contentious nature of slavery isn't a neutral stance, but rather one of indifference to the plight of the enslaved.
When we observe that Italians were feared as enemy aliens in the early 20th century, we mean it literally: Sacco and Venzetti were "anarchists", but "anarchist" was the term used at the time for "terrorist".
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 448 ms ] threadAnd when a new "enemy" arrives that's more appealing than the old "enemy" we reclassify the old "enemy" to be on "our side" (i.e. Greeks, Italians, etc used to be considered non-white).
Isn't it a bit disingenuous to omit the fact that both Iraq and Syria have areas experiencing active warfare? The bombing campaign is not occurring in a vacuum, is targeted at people engaged in warfare against us or our allies, and those conflicts have killed far more people than just the bombing campaign - including via the use of chemical weapons.
I'm not trying to justify civilian casualties, the ongoing drone attacks on multiple continents, or even answer whether we should be involved in these conflicts - I just think the situation is more nuanced than "the US has bombed/killed 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq".
But what you seem to ignore is that the active warfare in both countries was caused by us. And in Libya too.
Think about that. Those countries are now a mess because of "regime change".
Even outside of internal pressures, geopolitics are at play as well - Iran and Russia are playing "the great game" as much as the US/NATO are in the fight against terrorism.
The demonstrations in Syria were not spontaneous. They were engineered. If you have time, read the email exchanges between the US ambassador to Syria and H. Clinton.
Regarding Iran and Russia playing "the great game", they're supporting the legitimate govt of that country. Without their support, Assad would have been dead years ago, and Syria would have been in worse shape than it is now.
You might start by reading https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328
Edit: Added WikiLeaks links
Iran is definitely playing geopolitics when they arm Houthis (fighting the internationally recognized government) with anti ship missiles in the Strait of Hormuz. Were they also not arming the Iraqi insurgents/sending military forces over the border during the height of the conflict in Iraq? How about Russia in Ukraine (are the "little green men" freedom fighters or rebels?)? Russia has more than just the support of a government in mind when it supports Syria.
I'm not saying one side is right or wrong - just that none of these actions happen in a vacuum.
And you're correct, because they don't.
My original point in all of this is that we're creating a refugees crisis, but refusing to take them in. That, in my opinion, is just evil.
It's all geopolitics...
http://wikileaks.cabledrum.net/cable/2006/12/06DAMASCUS5399....
We basically took the most and arguably the most prosperous country in Africa (Libya) and ruined it. Now we're refusing to take in those fleeing from our mess. We did the same thing in Iraq and Syria.
But it seems we're not done yet. Iran is next.
Bit is anybody protesting war against countries that can do us no harm? Nah! It makes for good war video games and Hollywood war movies.
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vincent_Chin
(Since the first paragraph doesn't spell this out, Vincent's murderers thought he was Japanese.)
But is it also the goal to attempt to justify the current immigration ban by citing history? Conway brought up the Obama's tightening of the Iraqi immigration during his term. Does that somehow justify Trump's immigration ban?
I guess you can say she is just pointing out the media hypocrisy in being less judgmental with Obama than with Trump and that may be fair. But ultimately it is just a distraction in some sense. I fear Trump's camp is sticking to the "the media is hypocritical" campaign as a distraction. I guess it's a clever way to use the free bad press.
I find it interesting how we see this kind of "news" (reports?) in opposite ways.
I see it as a message of "We've done this before - and it was wrong then too! We often talked about how bad and stupid it was we did it at all, yet we're coming full circle."
Because I see the media as being largely left-biased, I see these reports as an attempt to remind or educate people on our history. Not supportive of the actions but critical of them. Meanwhile, I see right-leaning media as being more supportive of the actions and less critical (because they largely are...)
No, none of the articles I've read describe the past historical incidents in a positive light. They're attempting to compare modern actions (discriminating against Muslims) with past actions (discriminating against Italians, or Japanese, or women, or African-Americans). Similar comparisons are made between the Prohibition (of alcohol) and the War on Drugs.
The historical incidents are widely and easily recognized to be wrong because we're emotionally distant from them. People should be able to learn from history and realize that analogous actions today are similarly wrong.
-- No it doesn't What Trump did is not just stop immigration, but completely stop even people with valid visas, and green cards (Permanent Residents) from even entering. This is unheard off. Some of them were "detained", put with handcuffed for over 20 hrs.
In the midst of it there were a 5 yo, grandmas, and folks that worked for the US government, and served this country.
Completely different than just slowing down/stopping refugees coming in. The executive order was cruel and poorly implemented, (and parts of it most likely illegal).
I have travel coming up in two months, this makes me nervous.
Do you have a source for this by any chance?
If your a former Prime Minister of an allied nation, you'll probably only be detained an hour[0].
Otherwise your mileage may vary[1]. Your local authorities can probably give you some guidance on this.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/0...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/nyregion/airports-travele...
This is the problem with giving wide latitude to a trusted administration - it doesn't stop there.
I had a colleague on H1b who was sent home because his port of new york when his place of employment was houston. He was going to visit his sister there before flying to houston.
This is not a rare exception. There were many, many cases like this in 2009.
Sudanese student at Stanford detained, handcuffed at JFK airport
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/28/stanford-university-st...
She claimed that customs officials appeared confused and were apologetic to the detained travelers. One of them told her: “I have to do this.”
I have seen a lot of cries of hypocrisy, involving Obama's Iraq action you mention, and other things like drone strikes. It's a bit silly, since Obama did get a lot of criticism for this stuff, so the only argument for hypocrisy is that he should have had more. It's not something where a group was totally for X in one case, and totally against it in another case.
Anyway, if someone thinks this stuff is good, they should be able to make the case for it directly. They especially shouldn't be leaning on Obama's actions to justify it when their candidate's platform largely boiled down to "I am the opposite of Obama."
That's a fair point, right? People weren't skipping work and class to march in the town square when Obama bombed Yemen and other countries, but they'll do it when Trump makes a (insensitive, idiotic, broken, heavy-handed, unjust) change to the visa process?
Some have used this argument to defend Trump's actions. It doesn't work for that at all. "You didn't protest sufficiently about Obama, so you should approve of Trump's policies" is just a non sequitur.
Some have used this argument to say that we should have protested more about these other things. That argument works, but it's not actionable unless someone invents a time machine (and we'd have to go back and assassinate Hitler first anyway).
The only good, useful argument to be made with this is that we should be more critical and more willing to make ourselves heard in the future, which is great, but I don't know that I've seen anyone make it.
The argument is that the current reaction doesn't make sense given recent history. So the current "debate" is instead a placeholder for a culture war, disappointment with the election results, or something.
That is, the non sequitur is the new levels of disgust. The non sequitur is resolved if you add some subtext that make Obama deserve a (perhaps begrudging) pass and Trump a fail.
> That argument works, but it's not actionable...
Sure it's actionable. Politicians apologize for letting Obama get a pass. Some writers rip Obama a new one in ex post facto editorials. Propose laws to make sure president's can't bomb countries without Congressional approval. Propose laws giving Congress more oversight into the visa process, etc. Shoot, propose Constitutional Amendments if the rights of foreign nationals aren't clear enough.
> The only good, useful argument to be made with this is that we should be more critical and more willing to make ourselves heard in the future
Honestly, being heard isn't the problem. Trump supporters know what others think. Corporate America literally has TV specials, policies, and training courses about this stuff. The people with different concerns are just on different wavelengths, so there's no conversation, just a big struggle over the reigns of power.
We need to actually understand others' arguments (so we can in turn be better understood) instead of wondering if we need to do a better job of making themselves heard.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/japanese-inte...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Muslim_Percen...
And we have over 3 million Muslims in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States
People seem to label everything in politics with a positive or negative name, depending on their beliefs.
The left and right are so noisy with their claims, I'm having a hard time filtering through all the noise. If we could use a little math in our labeling, we wouldn't get an equality on the ban being for "Muslims". Perhaps we could have our Deep Learning machines come up with Classification names.
Which is why it's critical to oppose these horrible ideas when they are still in their early, tentative steps. Once they pick up momentum, they are much harder to stop.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
[1]"Trump asked for a ‘Muslim ban,’ Giuliani says — and ordered a commission to do it ‘legally’" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/29/tr...
1. too many terrorist attacks in the U.S. have been committed by people born overseas
2. many come from certain "bad actor" or otherwise dysfunctional countries; that they are majority-Muslim is true but it's an incidental fact, not the reason, which is international terrorism
3. the visa vetting process is therefore dysfunctional
4. so the U.S. should pause the visa process for countries referenced in point 2 until point 3 is resolved; it's better to be safe than sorry with respect to point 1
It's my understanding that the comparison to Obama is to support that point 2 isn't about being racist but about practical national security concerns that Obama shared. The difference with Obama's policy is a difference in the degree of concern, not type of concern. That is, if Trump is really racist here, then Obama's at least a little racist, which doesn't seem to be the contention of most people appalled by this executive order.
...that's my understanding of the thought process translated into HN-friendly lingo, anyway.
(http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jan/...)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5of8na/if_th...
Established groups feared new groups. But in the end, these people generally brought new innovations and economic growth and interesting new foods.
They mashed new cultures with old - not without pain - and eventually gave us General Tso's Chicken.
In other words, it's gonna be alright.
^^ this is what I tell people who support Muslim bans. I'm not sure if it helps them, but it helps me.
That said, there is no need to only have one argument, they can both stand together.
As best I can tell, we have no moral obligation to let every person into the United States, but we have an economically-sound reason for accepting a steady stream of new folks.
Really thoughtful comment though, thanks.
This doesn't make it okay, of course. This means we need to be that much more conscious of it, and take active steps to mitigate the effects of racism. (This is the distinction between "I'm not a racist" and anti-racism, btw)
In the long run, sure. But in the short run, were there Irish gangs, German mafia &c.? Were those forms of criminality different from the forms prevalent amonst ethnic-English Americans of the same time period? I honestly don't know.
What sort of social upheaval and strife occurred along the way to assimilation? In the long run, things might be okay, but how much pain will there be along the way?
Criminality us a result of being marginalized from society and not being able to work "honest" livings. You are forced to rely on your own group, pushed to the edges and fighting for its own.
My German-born great-grandparents were not molested by the government during WW I, though there was harassment of Germans and German-speakers. And in WW II the US had admirals and generals with names like Nimitz, Eisenhower, Eichelberger, Gerow.
These scientists were 'pseudo' only in retrospect. It literally took a world war to knock eugenicists out of the mainstream.
As we pat ourselves on the back today for being so rational and enlightened, we would do well to remember episodes like that and restore some sense of humility. The progressives of that era considered themselves no less enlightened and rational than we do ourselves.
Nowadays race more often means skin color and a deterministic culture, with the occasional addition of crude metrics such as IQ to justify preexisting biases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
Holmes is an intellectual hero of mine. I keep it as a reminder that we all have our historical blindspots.
This is well summarized by cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek; if you have Netflix then I heartily recommend watching the whole of this film there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37RLn28mrLU
Of course nobody is immune from this. I have subjective beliefs that I treat as axiomatic and I'm sure Zizek does too; it would be hard to get through the day if you weren't able to take anything for granted. But when we are engaged in philosophical thought, we should seek to minimize the axiomatic content of our argument and be clear about our reasons for designating some subjective beliefs as axiomatic. I believe strongly in a natural right of self-defense, for example. To justify this (to myself, not necessarily to anyone else), I observe that in nature, when animals or even plants are attacked and there is no possibility of evading the attack, they attempt to retaliate in some fashion in hopes of causing their antagonist to break off the attack. Of course I could be falling victim to a naturalistic fallacy here, and indeed there's a strong argument in western culture that the willing sacrifice of the individual self in pursuit of some collective good is a more effective strategy than direct confrontation; however the utilitarian argument for this course is predicated on the existence of an afterlife - if not in the sense of a physical heaven and hell, then in the sense of a collective memory of the sacrifice which informs the future behavior of the collective organism.
This too is an axiomatic belief for many people, but it in turn is subject to question; one might argue that is the death of ~6 million Jewish people during the Holocaust, most of whom went to their deaths compliantly rather than confrontationally is the largest identifiable sacrifice in accordance with a general principle of non-violence, how is it that only a few generations later anti-semitism has become fashionable once more, and there is a social contingent eager to resume such genocidal activities under the auspices of some warmed-over conjectures about racial superiority. Insofar as there's a conflict between the natural instinct to retaliate (which may or may not scale) and the social imperative to sacrifice oneself (which may or may not improve the strategic position of the embattled social group) I lean towards the natural instinct because it's the product of millions of years of evolutionary competition vs. thousands of years of social cooperation, but I feel like it would be a mistake to uncritically adopt either position as the correct one and then never question it again.
This may seem very abstract and intangible when I express it in philosophical terms, but given the high level of political polarization and the various socioeconomic and geopolitical circumstances that obtain today, we are or soon will be forced to make decisions on the basis of such fundamental beliefs and then live or die with the consequences. I claim, therefore, that an examination of our fundamental beliefs and the means by which we qualify them is a matter of grave urgency, because under sufficient stress we default to acting without thinking, and those actions are the products of the beliefs that we choose to hold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilizati...
And today, in our age of satellites and electronic computers, we have our own misconceptions - areas where nagging little doubts or details that don't quite fit the model (and are therefore trivialized or ignored outright). Examples: The unidirectional linearity of time. String Theory vs classical quantum model. Or even the "big bang" model. Our (lack of) understanding gravity and quantum entanglement.
Hopefully future generations with more understanding will look back at us, shake their heads, and ask "how could they have been so naive?"
I think the answer is, we're really not that far removed from our ancestors scratching the dirt with sticks and learning to control fire. Hopefully with continued inspection (introspection?) we get closer to the truth of science and its beauty.
This is "common knowledge about past common knowledge" which was never true, a somewhat ironic detail given your larger point.
It was common knowledge the earth was round since antiquity (as long as we've had sailors).
American and German eugenicists were in close contact with each other, especially after World War I: they were working together in international organizations, following and even reporting on developments in eugenics in each other's countries. The Germans did, in fact, borrow much of their 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring (the so-called 'sterilization law') from the model sterilization law drawn up for the various states by Harry H. Laughlin, Superintendent of the ERO, and a number of American eugenicists were impressed with the Nazi eugenical laws after 1933.
http://ideonexus.com/2007/12/02/the-complex-william-jennings...
In lessons learned from history, Jennings made the mistake of attacking the textbook on the validity of evolutionary theory instead of for the abhorrent promotion of eugenics. As a result, history remembers him as a buffoon rallying against a now-obvious scientific truth. I see a parallel today with many Climate Change denialists, who attack the science instead of attacking the policies being put forward using the science for support.
Well, some of that, but mostly he's remembered for being a powerful populist politician that delivered the "cross of gold" speech.
That was still pretty mainstream post-WWII in the US. And of course it's undergoing a renaissance as "race realism".
> As we pat ourselves on the back today for being so rational and enlightened, we would do well to remember episodes like that and restore some sense of humility. The progressives of that era considered themselves no less enlightened and rational than we do ourselves.
Aren't these issues exactly why modern progressives tend to be wary of cultural absolutism and monocultures?
Bill loved his country so much that when he failed the physical for the OSS - already an army captain - by being legally blind in one eye, he lied and cheated his way into a formal position helping the British train resistance fighters in Europe. He was just as conniving when he convinced his superiors to give him a mission to parachute behind enemy lines and lead a unit of French resistance fighters.
He made a career with the CIA. Even in the letter he gave me when I was born (he died before I met him), he described in great detail need to be fit in mind and body to serve your country.
He's buried in Arlington. So much for a threat to homeland security.
If anyone is interested, he documented his experiences of WWII in an exciting book, "The OSS and I." It's hard not to enjoy a book with a chapter titled: "How to blow up a bridge."
https://www.amazon.com/S-S-I-WILLIAM-J-MORGAN/dp/B0086N639A
Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Japanese didn't immigrate to other countries and slaughter its citizens.
I understand the tiny minority is the problem; just don't think your analogy to these other groups is an apt one.
Neither do Muslims? I mean, show me the statistics that show that they have a higher terrorism rate than other groups. The IRA, the extremist christian groups, and the mentally ill all do a lot of damage as well, but they're not being banned from the USA. I think Muslims get targeted by the media because they're different looking, and so they get reported on more thoroughly.
I could very well be wrong, but I honestly don't believe they are statistically more prone to terrorism.
Indeed, Pete King, one of the group assembled to work on the "Muslim Ban" has been a long-standing supporter of the IRA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
> they're not being banned from the USA
Were there countries with huge numbers of extremely violent mentally ill people, I have no doubt the US would limit or halt immigration from those places.
There are huge numbers of radical or radical-sympathetic Muslims. If you have an open mind, I suggest getting a Muslim's take on the actual numbers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSPvnFDDQHk (warning, has numbers, may not be PC)
It's fine to support open immigration, but denying that there is an unusual problem with violence in the Muslim community is indefensible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
Perhaps you could be more specific?
Unsurprisingly all sides in a muslim majority country's civil war are muslim, equally unsurprising is that the non-recognized-states action are written down as terrorism.
Just as a thought experiment, if you listed civilian casualties in the Ukraine-Russia war as deaths from terroristic acts you could easily come to the conclusion that it was Eastern-European Christians that were the world's greatest terrorists.
That wouldn't make sense anyway...how would they prove their Christianity?
Members of "minority religions" in their country of origin are eligible for waivers of the bans issued in the EO. Trump has specifically said that Christians would be a priority.
> That wouldn't make sense anyway...how would they prove their Christianity?
Whether it would make sense or not is irrelevant to whether it is actually part of the policy.
From your link, 100% of those killing 100+ are done by the islamic state militants who are fighting what they consider to be a civil war.
If you cannot manage to see the distinction in that, then you don't really have an open mind about this discussion.
> It's fine to support open immigration, but denying that there is an unusual problem with violence in the Muslim community is indefensible.
Being scared shitless of over 1.5 billion people just because some of them are bad people, is just ridiculous. There isn't a problem with violence in the Muslim community. Go to any Muslim community not in the middle of a war, and I doubt you'll find more violence than you do in your average Jewish or Christian community.
Those are horrific acts, but IMO are more akin to the US' behaviour in Vietnam, or Blackwater contractors in Iraq. Would you support a ban on Americans travelling to other countries because of those events?
The main focus of the documentary compares the styles of Trump and Vladimir Poutine, but has interesting recap/point of view on the evolution of terrorism in the middle east.
(his previous documentary, Bitter Lake, was on Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia, also interesting, but the visual/narrative style kind of annoyed me)
I think it's easily misleading to look at these things only by the numbers. We need a better understanding of the background. Numbers can support your argument/context, but you need a better argument.
Fitting a United States perspective into your criteria seems difficult. Using this Wikipedia reference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States), there have been only three terrorist incidents in the United States that have killed more than 100 people. One was September 11th (Islamic extremists). The second was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (right-wing extremist). The third, curiously enough, appears to be Mormon militias (the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre). Note, the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 could possibly fall in this category depending on the death estimate. A rather oddball collection there, not enough to generalize for sure.
Recent terrorist incidents in the United States with >=10 deaths have been biased towards Islamic terrorism, sure. However, going back to 2001, the perpetrators were: a person born to Afghan immigrants in the US (Pulse nightclub shooting); a Pakistani couple, one a US citizen and one a permanent resident (San Bernardino); a person born to Palestinian immigrants (Fort Hood); an African American who converted to the Nation of Islam (Beltway shootings); and September 11th (15 from Saudi Arabia, 2 from the UAE, 1 from Egypt, 1 from Lebanon).
Aside from September 11th, all of these incidents involve US citizens. And even if in the greatest of stretches we include the nationality of the parents, it is worth noting that (including September 11th) none of the nationalities that committed these terrorist acts are on Trump's 7 country travel restriction list.
I fear you many have selected the wrong forum to litigate this argument in. The deeper we dig into the facts behind the argument you're trying to make, the (rapidly) less credible that argument is going to become. You might have more luck with it on Facebook.
There's nothing particularly novel about modern fears that Muslims are all terrorists. It's just another case of othering.
It's easy to be scared right now, but turning to racist rhetoric instead of finding parallels in history is what allows fascism to take hold. Read up, educate yourself, and come back tomorrow better ready for building a better tommorrow.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/01/31/most-te...
So no other group since the largest terrorist act in the history of the United States?
If that's not a convenient choice in timing, I don't know what is.
I could see a ban making some sense, but any ban that leaves out Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia has deficiencies so glaring that it would never be worth the suffering caused.
9/11 is a valid date to start from because a large part of its shock value is that for the most part of post WW2 America, there weren't any foreign attacks on American soil. 9/11 was the anomaly, meant to provoke US outrage and further our violence against the middle East, convincing more young people that the US was an agressor and that they were the righteous. Clearly, these people are not righteous, but neither were we.
"The 1909 murder of Elsie Sigel in New York, of which a Chinese person was suspected, was blamed on the Chinese in general and led to physical violence. "The murder of Elsie Sigel immediately grabbed the front pages of newspapers, which portrayed Chinese men as dangerous to "innocent" and "virtuous" young white women. This murder led to a surge in the harassment of Chinese in communities across the United States."" - from the Wikipedia article "Anti-Chinese Sentiment in the United States"
The article goes on to talk about the "yellow peril" theory, in which scholars believed that "China, India, Japan and Korea were attacking England and the U.S., but that Jesus Christ would stop them"
Here's a pretty thorough argument on the characterization of the Irish as terrorists: http://inthepastlane.com/when-americans-saw-irish-immigrants...
I'll also point out that one of the final pardons of President Obama was of a Puerto Rican nationalist who led the FALN, a group that executed multiple bombings in major US cities in the 1970's.
So your allegation that the linkage of Muslims to terrorist extremism is unique is provably untrue.
> portrayed Chinese men as dangerous to "innocent" and "virtuous" young white women
Suspecting a group of criminal activity is hardly terrorism; you could have just quoted attitudes towards blacks for a less obscure analogy.
> So your allegation that the linkage of Muslims to terrorist extremism is unique is provably untrue.
I never said that no other group has ever been linked to terrorism. I said it hasn't ever been close to the scale it is now, with major attacks in every culture across dozens of countries. Comparing IRA to ISIS is a big stretch, not in type but in magnitude.
Actually, it was far worse (and more coordinated, backed by—among others—both major superpowers) during much of the Cold War, it's just that the armed forces using terrorism as a mechanism (especially ones successful in seizing and holding territory on the scale the "Islamic State" has) were more likely to be popularly labelled as militias or revolutionaries of whatever ideology their rhetoric focussed on (Communist, etc.) or, by governments sympathetic to their cause, simply as "freedom fighters". The ones that were labelled "terrorists" rather than other things were the ones that were comparatively unsuccessful.
There was also a lot of violent groups on the Right, but for whatever reason they didn't get labelled as terrorists as much and didn't seem to have the same kind of view of ideological solidarity. So the Sabra and Shatila massacre doesn't tend to get labelled a terrorist attack even though it dwarfed the actions of most of the above groups in brutality and death toll, and as far as I know there wasn't much solidarity between the Phalange and the KKK (even though they were both violent right-wing Christian groups).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
Also, here's a list of plane hijackings by Cuban sympathizers from the 50's and 60's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cuba%E2%80%93United_St...
My point is not that Islamist extremist terrorism is not A BAD THING that we should do our best to eliminate. It's more that we should resist the temptation to label it as a unique existential threat that justifies discrimination against an entire religion. History tells us that we've been down this path scores of times before, we've been wrong every time, and we've lived to regret our prejudice.
That's irrelevant though.
Disagree, but at least disagree with what I said :)
Oh and you should totally compare local ethnicities with a worldwide religious community of billions, that's totally the right thing to do.
- The case has been made that the Gothic tribe who sacked Rome originated from Sweden
- The Vikings pillaged and slaughtered in Russia, Britain, Continental Europe, the Mediterranean, even as far as Newfoundland
- During the Swedish Empire, Sweden colonized and occupied Finland and the Baltic states, and waged war on Continental Europe, conquering half of the Holy Roman Empire
- During the same period Sweden built forts in West Africa, I can tell you what they did there was not always pretty
- Under king Charles XII, Sweden waged war in first Russia, then Ukraine, then the Ottoman Empire, soundly defeated there tried to invade Norway
- Norway was invaded again and this time conquered in 1808, taking it as compensation for the loss of Finland to Russia in the Napoleonic wars
Now, that's just Sweden. Let's not mention Italy (Ethiopia, anyone), Germany (...) and Japan (oh boy).
You need to study your history.
Does removing it from its parent context make it better?
This is called the availability bias - you're correlating the tendency of a group to take certain actions with the ease of which you can think of examples of members of that group taking those actions.
If I can think of an equal number of examples of Christian (or Jewish or Eskimo) terrorists, then by your logic we should be equally suspicious of those groups.
Having a guilty and irrational fear of some group, whatever the group, seems almost part of american identity. I cannot think of any period of american history that wasnt steeped in such fears.
Perhaps the post-apollo 70s? Americans then feared nuclear war generally, but not russians as a people. Racism was a thing internally, but i cannot think of an especially hated outside group.
"We unambiguously won WWII. Back then the 'greatest generation' knew what was needed to win a war, and wasn't squeemish about doing what needed to be done. WWII was the last major war we actually won. Since then we have become too politically correct to actually win wars. Trump will change that. We will win again."
Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on.
This is one of the primary reasons that fascism is such an uncomfortable situation for its citizens. Fascism thrives in the face of an "enemy" that can be defeated by force and a "strong leader." These enemies will be selected by convenience, not rationality.
This was parodied in the movie Blazing Saddles, set in the American wild west, with a quote that I'd be [edit: apparently not] banned for repeating verbatim.
I sincerely hope that posting such a quote isn't cause for a ban - since it's pulled directly from the film, and does a good job of emphasizing the point you're trying to make.
Let's examine a few examples, using 'oompa-loompa' as an imaginary term of abuse. Shut up Alice, you're just an oompa-loompa! - not OK. Ignore Alice; she's a stupid oompa-loompa. - not OK. Bob denigrated Alice by referring to her as an 'oompa-loompa.' - OK.
It's not the specific words that are offensive, but the context in which they are employed. When you're reporting someone else's speech, it's OK to quote them accurately and in full - indeed I think it's often necessary. If we use euphemisms or bowdlerisms - such as saying 'the f-word' or 'f---' to avoid saying the word 'fuck' when reporting what someone said - the we are not only insulting the intelligence of our interlocutors, but we are softening the impact of the original statement. To do so out of a regard for the tender feelings of others is misplaced, because by implication we're saying that the offensive content inheres in the word rather than intention of the speaker, and the use of offensive words is easily dismissed nowadays by someone saying they 'misspoke'.
Let's take another example. Bob says to Alice: 'Your life is unimportant because you are only an oompa-loompa' in some public confrontation. Carol reports this on the evening news as 'bob said that Alice's life was not important, and employed an ethnic slur.' Technically true, but 'employed an ethnic slur' sounds pretty mild compared to the unpleasant experience of being called an oompa-loompa directly, or feeling empathy for someone subjected to such a term of abuse. By resorting to euphemism, the offensive nature of Bob's aggressive remarks towards Alice is significantly understated, which is a win for bob.
I think that when a public figure (qua someone whose utterances or actions are consequential because of their social reach) makes an offensive remarks such as 'You know what? fuck the oompa=loompas!' it should be reported verbatim on the evening news, not bleeped or euphemized. There's an argument that doing so spreads it and normalizes, it, and that is true to some extent. (There are increasingly common reports, albeit apocryphal, of school students excusing offensive or assaultive behavior by citing the President's well-documented model). But the unpleasantness of hearing that repeated and perpetuated has to be balanced against the value of people knowing exactly what was said and how it was said, so that the fact of offensive or assaultive behavior is not obscured to the end of deniability or dismissability.
Linguistic infantilization is but a prelude to cognitive manipulation, and the latter has reached pandemic proportions in an age of almost-instant global communication. The averred reluctance of some to be exposed to horrible words is really a plea not to be informed about the existence of horrible behavior, a preference for not knowing about the fact of conflict. Meaningful discourse on how we should behave is impossible if we cannot express ourselves honestly about how we do behave.
Second, it's intellectually dishonest to imply that this had anything to do with a malleable concept of race. Italy and the US were at war during WW2, and the additional scrutiny was very clearly based upon ancestral nationality, rather than ethnic, lines.
> Italian-Americans had faced prejudice for decades by the time the order was drafted, says Guglielmo. Italians were the biggest group of immigrants to the United States who passed through Ellis Island for much of the late 19th and early 20th century; between 1876 and 1930, 5 million Italians moved to the U.S. Not without backlash: By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans.
It discusses "outsider" status, and WW2 represented a massive debate about who was "trustworthy." Historians have pointed out that in many cases these camp approaches were in part appeasement tactics for the rather large fascist movements growing in America. Hell, WW2 was the mark of the last unsuccessful kleptocrat-fascist coup against America lead by the leadership of Chase Manhattan bank in concert with the actual German nazis. It nearly happened, too!
"Whiteness" is A Word for it that fascists don't like, in part because it speaks to their "white homeland" ideology. I rather enjoy using it to point out the other side of what they're polishing is in fact a turd.
> Second, it's intellectually dishonest to imply that this had anything to do with a malleable concept of race. Italy and the US were at war during WW2,
AND YET! Mysteriously! Japanese were specifically targeted for the harshest treatment, Italians the second most, and the fewest German Americans ended up in concentration camps. What's more, it "wasn't about race" but the principle tie for many of these people to these camps was their heritage and if their looks conformed to a stereotype!
Like you yourself said:
> and the additional scrutiny was very clearly based upon ancestral nationality, rather than ethnic, lines.
Honestly, what the hell do YOU think this means? If someone looked the part, as defined by their "ancestral heritage" they had their property seized and their entire families put into war-crime level imprisonment.
And you're going to say, "This isn't about race, it's about ancestral heritage." This just in: That's one of the primary components of race and the racist discourse in America. How many times did we see the Trump campaign supporters point out that if only 3rd greater generation Americans voted, the RNC would win the presidency every time?
You are eager to call it "intellectually dishonest" and maybe that'll work in your christian-sponsored micro-targetted facebook ads and now-banned subreddits. For everyone not looking for an enemy to blame it's the observable and objective facts. None of the concentration camps America set up were fun places, but the ones for the least white-looking people were objectively horrifying, and the seizure of property against that class of people was much more widespread and damaging. More asian-looking people were dissipated than every other category combined.
Practically speaking, it would be difficult to round up all German-Americans and put them into concentration camps in WW2. They had basically interbred with other people with dissimilar European ancestry, did not retain any unique accent, or group themselves into ethnic communes.
Additionally, many believed that by fighting against Germany in World War 1, all German-American's had proved their loyalty beyond any more doubt.
Lastly, Germany had its greatest waves of immigration to the America's either before the US was even a nation, or during its infancy.
Italians were a 'new' wave of immigration, pushed into ghettos due to existing social bigotry, and easily differentiated from the normal phenotypic blend of older immigrant populations that became the white American norm.
----
Personally, I believe that this is better stated as ethnic discrimination. In Europe, Africa, and Asia---all 'old world' continents---there is less of a tendency to trumpet ones own race. Rather people have the view that their ethnicity is the best, their bloodline lineage is the best, their family heritage is the best. Discrimination there takes the form of Germany believing that anyone who isn't german is low-class---which includes Spaniards, Italians, British, Russians, Poles, Finns, etc.
In the US today, ethnicity has been de-emphasized with a greater focus being put on race and religion, which is to our detriment in understanding both historical treatment of immigrants, and also current day treatment of immigrants.
For example: why are so many people against Syrians, but view Saudi's as tolerable? Why is Yemen seen less favourable than Oman?
I'd love to see a source for this. My research and interviewing my relatives who were there suggested that they were quite concerned that the germans were "hard to spot".
> Italians were a 'new' wave of immigration, pushed into ghettos due to existing social bigotry, and easily differentiated from the normal phenotypic blend of older immigrant populations that became the white American norm.
I mean it wasn't _that_ new. There was a major wave of immigration in 1910.
But bigotry based on appearance is almost always the basis of this.
Were they talking about German nationals, or German-American's?
Your argument is basically that if the word doesn't appear in the original article, we should be able to hold a discussion of that concept that refers to the article. There is a lot more to reading comprehension than iterating over a bag of words to see whether they appear in a given corpus.
Have you been in suspended animation for the past century or so?
Shame only works inasmuch as you believe folks have a point. It doesn't work on the guiltless or the guileless.
These objections do not necessarily imply that we should not attempt to publicly shame shameworthy behavior, but such tactics do harm some people who are guiltless (unless "guilt" here is intended to include feeling a sense of guilt without having actually done something wrong, in which case the statement seems tautological) and guileless. So does asserting that they don't in a public setting like this, independently of whether the particular individual the assertion is deployed against is themselves worthy of disapproval.
1. You can write a civil rebuttal that uses evidence to dismantle the point he's trying to make.
2. You can downvote him.
What you should not do is write a comment like this, where you vent emotionally without providing anything for anyone to grasp onto or respond to. Those kinds of comments get flagged (by clicking the timestamp on the comment, revealing the "Flag" button).
What. What?
Okay the last 2 years of political history have been a major, successful backlash by white men. Donald Trump won the election largely by the white vote. Brexit is happening largely due to the British brand of white identity politics.
> Yet, such racial discrimination is accepted and normalized.
What the heck are you talking about? White people and in particular white men still dominate the capital of a very large portion of the world. They're still over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in the US. They're still receiving more leniancy for crimes than equivalent socioeconomic substitutes that are non-white.
Are you mad because people notice this and are frustrated with the pace of change in your Facebook feed? Are you mad because you're confusing that gentle pressure with an actual injustice?
> White people and in particular white men still dominate the capital of a very large portion of the world.
Does this fact make slandering any better? what's the minimum economic divide that gives me a free pass over hate speech?
> They're still over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in the US.
The Japanese are over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in Japan. The Chinese are over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in China. US is majority white, plus there's a constant flux of people from Europe. People of different cultures, but mostly sharing the same skin color. US is also leading the efforts toward more diversity.
> They're still receiving more leniancy for crimes than equivalent socioeconomic substitutes that are non-white.
Statistics alone don't tell us the reason why. But you should try going from prison to prison to teach white inmates about their privilege. And, again, poor white people are not fed and sheltered by magic of statistical average.
> Are you mad because people notice this and are frustrated with the pace of change in your Facebook feed?
I'm afraid people think physical violence is something to be celebrated and used against political opponents. But your condescending tone is not worthy of further discussion.
I'm not sure that anyone is "radicalizing" the population anymore than it already is. America has had a small but vocal radical left for a long time.
> Does this fact make slandering any better? what's the minimum economic divide that gives me a free pass over hate speech?
I really wish I knew what you were talking about.
> The Japanese are over-represented in every growth sector of the economy in Japan. [etc]
These are unfair comparisons and you know it. I used the term "over-represented" carefully. We'd expect a regression of the workforce to something roughly approaching the actual national population averages. Instead, we do not see that at all.
> Being against Trump is not mutually exclusive to holding media accountable.
I really wish I understood even remotely what you were actually aiming at. "Holding media accountable?"
> I'm afraid people think physical violence is something to be celebrated and used against political opponents.
Okay, stop right here. Let's break this down, because I _do_ think I know what you're talking about. You're mad because #punchanazi is a thing, and because Richard Spencer has been hit twice.
Let's point two things out here:
1. In general, the protest in the US has been overwhelmingly and surprisingly peaceful with the exception of a very small number of extreme groups in the margins, _with 2 exceptions_. Both involve members of a vocal minority of people who incite violence against vulnerable people while claiming that is their ideology.
2. Richard Spencer is someone who plainly and loudly advocates for the removal of anyone who is not "white" from America, by force if necessary. He advocates the end of a free and open society to create a "white homeland." He is not a 'political opponent.' He's an advocate for the collapse of a free, democratic society into a religiously motivated fascist state.
He's a special case. And he represents a historically special case. And before you say I'm misrepresenting his case, you should listen to him talk to people who accuse him of being a fascist actor.
> But your condescending tone is not worthy of further discussion.
It's not my fault you refuse to actually mount an argument there, Red_Tarsius. Other people who are not me and lack my somewhat wry writing style have pointed out you're not bringing much to the table other than hemming and hawing about how put upon you feel and how we should all play nice with the actual nazis among us.
You call yourself "an enemy." I wonder what you think that's really like. There's a really sharp divide in my life around the things that made me feel bad and the people who genuinely hurt me for what I was. I only consider one group my enemy.
"Finns faced racial discrimination, with many people using the Finnish language as “proof” that Finns were not European and thus fair game to be subject to unfair treatment. Some argued that Finns were Asian, meaning they should be barred from citizenship under the Asian Exclusion Act of the early 1900s. The word “Finlander” was used as a slur, along with “China Swede” and “roundhead.”"
http://inktank.fi/china-swedes-forest-finns-and-the-great-mi...
Bonasera, the funeral director (corpse valet): I believe in America. America has made my fortune. But when Bonasera's daughter is raped, the (white, American) police did nothing. So he goes to the Godfather for justice.
There's always a distinction between white America and Michael's immigrant Italian-ness. Even the beginning of II, young Vito is an immigrant but is drawn back into his community. Always a distinction, cultural, ethnic, generational, racial.
The Godfather really is a/the great American novel.
In hindsight, I guess it's obvious that Kay doesn't look like the other women in the family. As someone who considers Italians to be "white", it never really stood out to me as notable (aside from the fact that she was unfamiliar/uncomfortable with the family business). I also never would have associated going to war or going to college as rebelling against being Italian, just seemed like a normal thing for a kid to want to do. Probably you view some of these things differently if you've read the book...
"There are many reasons for the common understanding forged by Finns and Native Americans, but above all they were united by their intimate relationship with the forest. Just like the Ojibwa Finns hunted, fished and foraged. The locals also valued Finns’ handiwork skills: the ability to build a boat or carve skis. Finns learned how to cultivate maize and use medicinal herbs, among other things. In return they lent their expertise in building log cabins and weaving shoes out of birch bark."
Where are the articles arguing that "East Asians," "Indians," "Arabs," or other racial groups are just social constructs and that these peoples consequently lack the right to control the immigration policy of their respective nation-states?
It might be worth mentioning that I regard your view of East Asian identity as extremely simplistic partly because I'm married to an Asian person and have had a disproportionately large number of friends from that region for several decades. Your homogenous characterization of the region is superficially persuasive but falls apart as soon as you look at the history of the region in any detail.
As for lacking the right to control immigration policy (a subject that was not in discussion but which is clearly what you want to express your views about, arguments against the restrictive immigration policy that obtains in the various East Asian countries are made all the time - not on the basis of those people lacking rights of self-determination but on the basis of economic utility. Finally, you overlook the fact that the the US (where I suspect you are based and whose immigration policy you're indirectly commenting on) was, unlike the East Asian countries you mention, explicitly founded on inclusive liberal ideas (as exemplified in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence) rather than on an ethnic nationalist identity and that it's not unreasonable to evaluate US policy in the light of the assertions upon which it is nominally founded.
You're right that those are all equally social constructs. Same with Arabs, that's a massive group.
When someone is discriminated against with a broad brush their list of qualifications for "an ally" is often the other people equally maligned in that group, so if "Arabs" as a group talk back to discrimination against "Arabs" then that's an unsurprising development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_lynchings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_massacre_of_1871
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot
Technically not a lynching I suppose, but as far as mass killings of minorities go..
In any case, it just goes to show that many groups have been 'the other' that people blame for problems.
They were, of course, guilty — as their lawyer later told Upton Sinclair.
And just for spice, so we remember this stuff is in living memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre
There have literally been a rash of terrorist attacks in Europe perpetrated by radicalized Syrians, Somalians, and Iranians. Not to mention the knife attack from Somalian refugee (who was getting a free ride) at Ohio State.
Read through these lists and tell me there is nothing to be worried about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
Yes, being a victim of a terrorist attack is as likely as getting hit by lightning but that doesn't mean you should wrap yourself in aluminum foil and go outside in a thunderstorm. You usually protect yourself and take shelter.
Its ok to protect yourself when there is a conceivable threat.
That being said, I do feel the travel ban was hastily rolled out without much coordination and caused some people to be detained that shouldn't have been but to completely disregard the principle of it as misguided or racist in some way is just disregarding the truth of the state of world.
In fact, many pundits are saying this going to create more propaganda or create more terrorists.
First, I disagree with notion that we should care about ISIS's propaganda. People don't become terrorists because a country bans them. They become terrorists when foreign power drops bombs and puts boots on the ground in a country they feel is theirs. Others become terrorists because they are forced to or naive minded people looking for some purpose in life.
If all we care about is their propaganda we will be frozen to inaction because anything you do can be spun against you.
Furthermore, the things ISIS hates the most is the cultural imperialism imposed on them. They don't like western values and don't want to adopt any western ideas since they are a threat to the foundations of their belief system. A threat they are willing to kill for. So really you are damned if you do and damned if you don't with ISIS. It's an ugly and complicated mess and comparing to Italians or Japanese is a gross oversimplification.
The number of terrorists that the travel ban would have stopped is at best in the low single digits. It is not at all clear that the number will exceed the number of people in the US who will become radicalized due to this policy (which I would also estimate at low single digits).
That being said, your argument is intellectually deceiving. Toddlers neither carry out acts of terrorism, neither they kill or hurt in the name of any ideology.
Terrorism by definition means to terrorise the population, not kill the greatest amount of people. Besides that, when you carry out a terrorist act in the name of some ideology, be that radical islam, white supremacy, national separatism, etc., society is called not to act upon the results of your actions but on the ideology committing the terrorist act itself. The answer to why toddlers accidentally kill people with guns is easy: they have guns available and they aren't old enough to understand what they are doing. But the answer to why do radical islamists or white supremacists kill people is all but simple.
Also as a final thought. Even inside terrorism there are degrees on morality. Sure it's bad to carry out terrorism even in the name of national identity and freedom (i.e. IRA, ETA), but at least you have a clear message on what are the terrorists' demands and how to stop it. Radical Islam (and others) don't even have these demands - unless the submission of all the western world to radical islam can be considered a valid demand.
1. Toddlers and cows and staplers do not have the potential to destroy Midtown Manhattan. This is a different category of threat entirely.
2. We aren't robots. We're humans who have evolved in a particular set of environments and contexts to be more scared of some things than others. It's perfectly rational to try to reduce the chance of harm from certain classes of things that we happen to fear more, even if those things aren't the most harmful over all. Fear matters. Reducing fear matters. Because we're people.
You seem to think this is evidence that people just need to be educated about the relative risks. But I think it's evidence of something much deeper in the species.
But that's not the argument.
The argument is about if the policy put forth by Trump&Co make sense given the data. To ONLY part of the data for policy decisions makes no sense.
Consider this:
Immigrants and refugees commit crimes at lower rates than others. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/us-record-shows-refugees... https://www.cato.org/blog/immigration-crime-what-research-sa...
Comparatively, what is the threat of terrorism: http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics-terrori...
I cannot speak to the vetting process for allowing refugees into European countries, however the current vetting process is a lengthy 1 1/2 - 2 year process. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/11/20/infogra...
Do our policies make sense: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/tr...
That is, it's clear to me that people calling this "racist" might even be correct, but it may not matter if it seems like they're calling middle America racist. That looks a lot like being understanding towards Iraqis ("I know you're not all terrorists") while being bigoted towards Americans ("You're clearly all racist!"). Anyway, once that meme (doesn't really like Americans) is implanted, then Trump takes a hit today but get some "marketing" wins in the long run when it comes to other issues coming up (Supreme Court appointments, ACA changes, etc.)
it may not matter if it seems like they're calling middle America racist
It's true that promoting such a perception would benefit the Trump administration, but as I always say to people seeking to capture some ideological territory, 'you don't speak for the American people.' At present the administration is rather overdrawn at the credibility bank.
You can refute all you want. I'm talking about real conversations I've had with real people. It looks like some Americans are hateful towards "hateful" Americans and it puts people on the defensive and pushes them away.
EDIT:
> you don't speak for the American people
Right. That's not the message that people are getting. There are lines being drawn and many decent people feel like they're being hated along with neo-nazis. That sort of visceral feeling is hard to shake off when you want to later appeal to their sense of decency when health insurance rules are being reconsidered.
I think a lot of other people who are for the ban aren't racist, just misinformed. A lot seem to think Muslim immigrant|refugee == terrorist.
One person told me "I'm for the ban because I don't want them to come and kill me and my family in our sleep."
I blame this perception on the people who seek to profit by the general hysteria, not those manipulated by it. I am sad for the victims of it.
> A lot seem to think Muslim immigrant|refugee == terrorist.
Some do. But some people think the U.S. never landed on the moon. That is, just like not every Muslim is a terrorist, not every person who wants change in our visa laws wants to introduce internment camps, etc.
It's fair to think the due diligence done in admitting foreign nationals has been lacking. I think this particular approach is heavy-handed and inhumane, but we're not arguing for a more humane alternative... actually, I'm not sure what we're arguing about other than people are mad and think things are really racist right now.
> I'm for the ban because I don't want them to come and kill me and my family in our sleep.
So maybe you heard "Muslims are clearly dangerous" when they meant "my government's job is to protect my family and waiting until people are dead is too late". And even if they think Muslims are more dangerous, the right response is to, empathetically, discuss facts (statistics, counterfactuals) with them. The goal is to appeal to their better nature, not to make them lose so we win. All the left-wing apoplexy and panic these days is actively harmful from that perspective.
> I blame this perception on the people who seek to profit by the general hysteria, not those manipulated by it. I am sad for the victims of it.
Me too. I think the misconceptions about Trump-voting America is the another instance of the same phenomenon. And it's no less harmful, in my mind.
It's fair to think the due diligence done in admitting foreign nationals has been lacking.
It really isn't. It takes a huge amount of vetting for a refugee to given permission to enter the USA. It's fairly easy to enter the country if you're a citizen of the EU or Japan or Canada or Australia (all of which have a good deal of socioeconomic common ground with the USA) but overall it's difficult. Visas are simply not handed out like cookies.
Some immigrants have subsequently committed crimes or even acts of terrorism within the US. but the incidence is significantly lower than that of natural-born American citizens. None of the available evidence supports the claim that there is some sort of security crisis requiring the imposition of drastic measures.
the right response is to, empathetically, discuss facts (statistics, counterfactuals) with them. The goal is to appeal to their better nature, not to make them lose so we win
I wholly agree and practice this diligently, but at some point the responsibility falls upon the listener to evaluate the information that has been provided to them and make a decision. If they just can't make up their mind for whatever reason, then chances are they'll never be politically active and investing more effort in persuading them is not an effective use of my time. If they endlessly pose counterarguments and excuses, then after a while I start to they're either arguing in bad faith or they have an position that they can't defend but don't want to give up, and it's likewise a waste of my time.
Lest this seem dismissive I'd like to point that I've been discussing politics civilly as an adult for maybe 25 years now, so if I give up on trying to persuade someone it's not from an inability to articulate an argument or an unwillingness to entertain opposing points of view.
Me too. I think the misconceptions about Trump-voting America is the another instance of the same phenomenon. And it's no less harmful, in my mind.
Get back to me when people being shot for supporting Trump without really believing in much of anything is a regular (or even an occasional) occurrence. By contrast I can point to a significant and growing death toll for acts of terrorism carried out by members of the far-right.
There are lines being drawn and many decent people feel like they're being hated along with neo-nazis.
No doubt, but insofar as they choose not to acknowledge the existence of neo-nazis in the face of abundant evidence or the threat such neo-nazis pose towards people they don't like, then it's not surprising that people who feel threatened by neo-nazis are going to feel similarly annoyed with those who enable them.
To my mind, this is similar to someone in the Confederacy saying that slavery wasn't a big issue because they didn't personally own any slaves. While that would certainly make them less culpable than someone who did own slaves, declining to acknowledge the contentious nature of slavery isn't a neutral stance, but rather one of indifference to the plight of the enslaved.
https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/29/randazza-what-shall-we-do...
When we observe that Italians were feared as enemy aliens in the early 20th century, we mean it literally: Sacco and Venzetti were "anarchists", but "anarchist" was the term used at the time for "terrorist".