We must defund and destroy not just ICE but the paramilitary system that it is a part of (FBI/DHS/etc).
If you buy into the IPO, if you work at Palantir, or if you financially gain from this ecosystem you are profiting from the racist deportation of people who just want a better life.
I've never heard of a downside to having a large talent pool - how could there be?
Stop being naive of history and context for pedantry’s sake, and de-emphasizing well worn narratives to manage the emotions along your preferences
Borders define a zone of resource control for those able to protect the borders
A physical reality exists aside from whatever logical diagram you can imagine in your head
Biology explains it without needing some clean room philosophy defined right here with Mr r/iamverysmart
Everyone with a keyboard and net connection thinks they’re unearthing new elements themselves these days by drawing two overlapping circles and jamming whatever they want in it
Borders are not meant to "control access to wealth and opportunity". One thing they actually do is keep social welfare programs in check. That's just not possible when you can't control the number of recipients of these benefits, much less the number of non-contributors, but it is possible when legal immigrants receiving these benefits can be counted as such.
Many in the US (and to a lesser extent Western Europe and Australia) seem to answer that last question with a "yes." It's never addressed why border controls by China, Mexico, or really any non-Western country aren't also "reprehensible."
If you professionally write software that runs on or own any electronics with semiconductors or lithium ion batteries you are profiting from child slavery, war, and exploitation of workers through the rare-earth elements mining industry that provides the raw materials to produce these devices. That's not to mention the crimes committed during manufacturing chain of said devices.
This is an impossible moral standard. Yours is just as impossible. The FBI and DHS do a lot more than just deport immigrants. Palantir does more than just aid in deporting immigrants. If everything were so black and white the above statement would likely describe what you do as well.
Sure, but the point I think is that every one of us is actually benefitting from the proceeds of these ‘crimes’ in real time.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care or ‘object’ to them.
What it does mean is that finger pointing and trying to act like we aren’t part of the problem but ‘they’ i.e. Palantir etc, are, is simply a way of pretending we aren’t complicit.
If borders are a problem, we need to solve that problem by working out a path to eliminating them that actually minimizes harm.
We can’t do that if all our energy is spent on branding people ‘criminals’ and ‘objecting’ to them when we’re part of the same system ourselves.
I think the point here is that Palantir presents itself as not participating in deportations or other widely-considered-distasteful things, and yet they do, and that deserves particular outrage.
I think it's quite reasonable for a company to say we don't know exactly what our supply chain looks like and the only way anyone can build electronics is to use somewhat-questionable supply chains, but we'll do the best we can and and take action if we know of specific instances of harm (e.g., avoid known-bad suppliers), because that's the only way to do better. I think there's a number of food companies and clothing companies that do the same thing about working conditions in their supply chains, too. Palantir isn't doing that - they're speaking out of both sides of their mouth, saying "of course we aren't doing it" while directly being involved. If Palantir were to say, for instance, that they understand their product could be used in this way, they're not interested in providing services for deportations and will cut off customers who are using it for that or indirectly providing services for other organizations doing that, then the public reaction would be very different.
(They could also say "Palantir fully supports the mission of America's law enforcement including ICE and ERO, work here if you want to support law and order and make America great again," and then nobody would accuse them of hiding what they work on.)
That’s a fair point, but it’s also fair to say that the reporting and comments do in fact conflate these two things, which is a similar problem in its own way.
>I think it's quite reasonable for a company to say we don't know exactly what our supply chain looks like and the only way anyone can build electronics is to use somewhat-questionable supply chains, but we'll do the best we can and and take action if we know of specific instances of harm
No major semiconductor companies really does that that and definitely no tech company using the devices made by those semiconductor companies do that either. And even if they said they did it is still happening, so by the same standard this article is finding Palantir culpable of the deportations, I'd say its fair to find every tech company culpable of child slavery and exploitative mining practices as an example.
If it weren't Palantir it would just be another company. It seems pointless to focus on them specifically or ICE or any of the enforcement agencies for that matter when what seems to be the actual driver is the policies and laws that necessitates their existence. Seems like focusing on changing that is a much better target if you cared more than just assigning moral blame. Whether or not Palantir denies anything doesn't really change much if the outcomes are the same.
>you are profiting from the racist deportation of people who just want a better life.
This seems like a oversimplistic take on undocumented immigrants. Yes, they just want a better life, but they're also violating immigration laws to do so. Not deporting them sends a signal that violating immigration laws okay and disincentives people from going through the proper channels.
Infact, if all your economic projections are based on continued growth, both in production and consumption, were going to need more people in this country. The process and the legality aside, the only ways to increase GDP growth is to create more efficient workers or increase the number of workers. The other option is a deep, self inflicted, down turn like Japan had for 20 years.
There's room for lots of people and there's going to b a need for more people in this country as the boomers finally retire in their 80s.
The (completely reasonable) alternative is to avoid a system that only works when there's permanent exponential growth in a finite world.
On top of that, growing GDP is different from improving average quality of life. If GDP goes up 10% by growing the population 20% through mass immigration, it's plausible quality of life will go down in aggregate. Why is GDP growth the right metric?
I'm with you. Unfortunately, unless we change they system around so it doesn't have to grow forever, the weakest are the ones that get screwed as the economy shrinks.
You can't have it both ways, unfettered capitalism with continued growth and negative population growth.
GDP is not the right metric to show increase of quality of life, but it is a quick metric to show economic expansion and contraction.
There's a much broader conversation about how we want out system to work.
What about the poor people in the US, whose hourly rate is lower because of the flow of illegal immigrants? Aren’t the poor in the US disproportionately minority?
Yes, there is a downside of having a large “talent” pool of unskilled labor. If you’re a high school dropout, US citizen, you’re competing with this “talent” for handyman jobs, landscaping, house cleaning, etc.
Sure, it’s great to have cheap landscaping, but before you dismantle ICE, go speak with a US citizen who’s doing roofing, and ask if their income would be higher without the illegal immigrants.
Blame the employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants, then. If they weren't breaking the law by hiring them, then there'd be greatly reduced motivation to travel here and work illegally (versus attempting to come in legally).
Sure, you can blame them both. Like many things multiple parties are responsible for the issue. But one group, in this case, is tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) inviting the other into the US to participate in the illegal job market. So, at least from my perspective, that puts a larger portion of the blame on the employers. They're also (along with enforcement agencies, again focusing on the employers) the only ones in a position to meaningful reduce the illegal job market.
Actually fine these businesses, threaten them with being shutdown and actually shut the worst offenders down. They're probably in violation of quite a few labor and tax laws as well, beyond just the issue of who they hire.
There's a couple of answers here. The big one is that if you're here illegally, you already know you have limited (though not zero!) recourse to the law, so you're willing to take illegal jobs - jobs that pay below minimum wage, jobs that are cheaper for the employer because safety standards are being ignored, etc. Immigration law is one way in which the law regulates the labor market; labor law itself is also part of it, and if we're going to talk about upholding the law, let's take both into account. If we were to include significantly more migrant workers under legal immigration, they would have effective access to the protections of labor law, which means they have less room to undercut US citizens.
They'd also have more access to jobs that tend to effectively require work authorization. You can pay a fellow in cash to work on your roof without going through E-Verify; you can't quite easily pay a fellow in cash to work at a major fast food chain or drive a school bus or be an SRE at a thousand-person tech firm or whatever. So increasing legal immigration may have the effect of reducing the labor supply for house and farm work.
More generally, the economy is a complex thing, and each change you make has many effects. The wage for roofers is determined by both supply (number of potential roofers) and demand - if more people live here, there are quite literally more roofs. While I'm not saying this by itself is likely to save the roofing-labor market, I do think that there are likely broader effects from increasing our pool of legal immigrants besides the most obvious one of depressing wages, and we should look at more than just the extremely short term.
And in the long term, if population growth keeps up, the pool of unskilled labor with domestic work authorization is going to go up on its own. If our economy/society can't handle that, we should be figuring out how to address that anyway.
(This is all a bit orthogonal to dismantling ICE - I do agree that having an underclass of laborers without equal protection under the laws is bad for everyone. I just don't think that ICE is a morally justifiable solution to that problem. We should create more "proper pathways" for people to become documented residents and authorized workers, but until we do so, I don't think having ICE around makes things better.)
Sorry, but I find that to be an immature, reactionist post - how is it racist if it's about nationality and legla status? Illegal immigrants cheat not just the system, but legal immigrants, and themselves. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by applying for H-1B or other processes to earn a better life. Consequently, you lose nothing if you are deported, since you received a free tour ride out of Uncle Sam's own pocket.
Everyone wants an owned house, a nice car, a stable job, and a loving family next to them. You have to earn it. Get in line, haha. If we allow illegal immigration, we're destroying people's chances to stay professionally and legally competitive with each other, and working and integrating yourself in a new country is devalued.
You can't keep living under Damocles' sword of being thrown out at a moment's notice, serving as blackmail for your employer and nemeses. Why not earn the citizenship and the right to vote - to do something about Trump, Biden, and other such politicians? To make sure you can fund your children's college before someone from 4chan doxxes you to the authorities?
I'm sorry I'm surrounded by people who believe in impossible goals like world peace and lack of borders.
Which first-world countries in the world have open, unlimited immigration?
Have we thought critically about the positive aspects of border control? Or have we created drawn a moral line in the sand and refused to take up the rationales that may exist and address them? For example, have we put on our thinking caps and thought about how to preserve welfare states in the face of budgets and headcount?
More specifically, they build data analysis and CRUD apps on top of a ton of ETL for large clients. They skew towards government contracts, and probably due to their founder have a different view on what's morally acceptable.
I guess the reason why they're involved in this is that the mechanics of deporting someone is a non-trivial data workflow through a bunch of crappy legacy systems, and given they've already got the ETL set up to get the data out, they can create a quick CRUD interface, or use data analysis to find suitable targets. That, plus the fact the company culturally agrees with the deportations, make it a reasonable business for them.
In many ways it's the same role as IBM played in the holocaust. These abhorrent operations are huge logistical undertakings, and that requires investment in tech that governments often aren't able to achieve.
Culture comes from the top, I don't think anyone at Palantir can be surprised that this is the result when Thiel is their leader.
Generally people will accept "human rights" abuses for ends that they feel strongly enough about if there aren't alternatives. Maintaining the existence of borders as a practical construct is one of those things. So, if you want to end those "human rights" abuses, you'll need to provide alternatives.
Then change the law and make it fair for eveyone. The current system of protecting people entering into USA favors a particular demographic, which by itself is unfair and unjust.
I am also looking for a better life and want to immigrate to USA. But there's no easy way to do it without breaking the law. Creating a system that incentivizes people to break the law and deters law-abiding people to immigrate is not the answer.
Why? I don't know where you are coming from, but the world is a big place and there are lots of nice places to go. Granted, there are visa / immigration issues in plenty of countries apart from the US as well, but frankly for decades now the US has been on the decline in every measure of livability: health care, education, incomes, leisure time, commute time, etc, etc. About the only thing the US nominally leads in is a vague notion that you can make more money here than in other countries, but even that is subjective relative to the cost of living and quality of life.
> Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. Mike Godwin himself has also criticized the overapplication of Godwin's law, claiming it does not articulate a fallacy; it is instead framed as a memetic tool to reduce the incidence of inappropriate, hyperbolic comparisons. [...]
> In December 2015, Godwin commented on the Nazi and fascist comparisons being made by several articles about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying: "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump, or any other politician." [...]
> In June, 2018, Godwin wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times which denied the need to update or amend the rule, and which rejects the idea that whoever invokes Godwin's Law has lost their argument, and which argues that appropriate application of the rule "should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter". [...]
> In June 2019, after Chris Hayes invoked Godwin's Law in a discussion of whether it was appropriate to call the United States's refugee detention centers "concentration camps", Godwin explicitly stated his belief that the term "concentration camps" was appropriate.
Literal genocide is now being practiced at the border.
I'm not sure what part of this comparison is outrageous to you. The material conditions of reality have changed: now we are at a point where these comparisons are apt.
And I'm ashamed that you're describing a number of hysterectomies that at most, using laughably high estimates, could number in the thousands, as genocide. (Which would be horrible! But also leave enough evidence that it would clearly not be one or two cases)
If someone's actually attempting genocide and all they can manage is a few thousand sterilizations, they should be fired for incompetence, too! (Plus, you know, genocide)
Further, is there any evidence that you would be willing to accept that genocide is not happening here? Any source that you'd be willing to commit to accepting?
I think my comment was unclear, so let me try and clarify.
> And I'm ashamed that you're describing a number of hysterectomies that at most, using laughably high estimates, could number in the thousands, as genocide
Two things here:
1. the number of hysterectomies that a single doctor could perform over, say, 4 years is ~10,000 (at 10/day). That's an extreme case, and relies on almost everything being geared towards rate of surgeries, and so works as an upper bound for what was alleged. (That there was a doctor purposefully sterilizing ICE detainees)
2. 10k sterilizations is not genocide. It would be monstrous, but it's at least 100x too few to count as that IMO given the ~10m illegal immigrants already residing within the US.
> (Which would be horrible! But also leave enough evidence that it would clearly not be one or two cases)
"Which would be horrible!" should require no explanation. The second point here is that if a doctor was somehow able to perform thousands of hysterectomies every year, there would be mountains of evidence for that, and conservatively tens of victims willing to speak up and go to the press, even if only 1% were willing and able.
> If someone's actually attempting genocide and all they can manage is a few thousand sterilizations, they should be fired for incompetence, too! (Plus, you know, genocide)
If this was being orchestrated by someone at ICE somehow, I would expect there to be more "effective" and less likely to be exposed methods of sterilization available to a determined administrator. Thus, two reasons to fire them - one is that they're an utter piece of shit for attempting genocide, and the second is that they're fucking incompetent. A sort of "awful taste AND awful execution" scenario.
> Further, is there any evidence that you would be willing to accept that genocide is not happening here? Any source that you'd be willing to commit to accepting?
This should also be self explanatory. Is there a news source that you would trust if it said that there was no evidence of genocide here? If MSNBC or the NY Times said that this was all a hoax, would you accept that? Or the governments of Guatemala, Honduras, etc? I ask this because you've rejected denials from ICE, the hospital, and the Mexican government - what other sources do you expect to be reliable?
If your belief isn't falsifiable, then I know not to expect any engagement from you.
> Please, I implore you, read your comment again. It is so callous as to be near-sociopathic. Yours is very much not a healthy view into morality.
I've clarified everything there that I think might have been unclear. Is it less sociopathic to you now?
> The holocaust started with forceful relocations.
This misses the context behind the relocations. In the case of the holocaust, they were legally living there before being relocated. In the case of undocumented immigrants, they illegally moved there, and are now being moved back.
And what is wrong with that. Those people are an invasion force. Regardless they want a better life or whatever else, they need to do this in their own countries, not in the US.
Deportation of illegal aliens (let's not mince the words with euphemisms like "undocumented immigrants") is the right thing to do and any organization which can help ICE/USCIS/DHS/Whatever else organization, is doing a big service to the US.
I, as an US citizen taxpayer, am not required to hold the pot for those illegal aliens to get better healthcare, better education for their children and better earnings than what they can do in their home countries. At the end of the day, they are not paying taxes (don't start with the sales tax or ITIN rhetoric, I know those and those arguments don't hold water) but using the resources more than the taxpayers do. At the end of the day, my taxes are going to support their lifestyles, instead of coming back to me in the name of services needed.
And don;t even get me started with the states like my home state California. They use public tax money to defend illegal alien cockroaches against deportation, which is what they should face, in the legal boundaries.
As a legal immigrant, born from parents that legally immigrated to another country, I see illegal immigrants (and I met some of them, scamming the government and society to live illegally) as a spit in the face of those that used legal ways to immigrate.
>scamming the government and society to live illegally
Right, because no US born citizen has ever done that.
Dude. There's always some segment of society that is going to try to scam or that is going to wallow around unwilling to provide for themselves. You can either get over it or you can do what our system does over and over again and make it miserable for everyone.
You don’t think the United States should be a little more compassionate towards people trying to find a better deal in life than what their previous home could offer? As an American, I have had life pretty good, but that was purely by luck. I could have been born into any other country on the planet. In reality, many of these people which you call illegal alien cockroaches did not have the means of coming to the United States legally. In some cases, they risked their life just for a chance to make it to the border. Have some compassion.
When my family fled from Switzerland in the 1600s and went to Germany, we had to pay extra tax there as "undesirables." This was after having our farms burned and being imprisoned in Switzerland for being "the other".
While you slander those who come from south of you, I could just as easily talk about the "cockroaches" from California who have "invaded" Cascadia, bringing with them an alien way of life and running up our cost of living.
Point being, while you are busy spreading your venomous bile, never forget that we are all immigrants from somewhere and that to someone we are "the other." Sooner we realize we are all human and we'd better all start working together, the sooner we might actually figure out sane immigration policies. Better move quick because Mother Nature is mad and there's a whole lot of places that aren't going to be fun to live in the next century.
the only way i see a world without passports or border is when we discovered aliens but until then there will always be differences and imaginary border is what defines it
What the fuck is this? Cockroaches? That’s language of actual genocide. You should not be welcome in this community. Perhaps reconsider where you’re getting your information from and develop an iota of empathy.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadIf you buy into the IPO, if you work at Palantir, or if you financially gain from this ecosystem you are profiting from the racist deportation of people who just want a better life.
I've never heard of a downside to having a large talent pool - how could there be?
Is it racist for a country to have and enforce borders at all?
I meant that seems like something you could argue, but it also seems very reductive and certainly not a given.
Borders define a zone of resource control for those able to protect the borders
A physical reality exists aside from whatever logical diagram you can imagine in your head
Biology explains it without needing some clean room philosophy defined right here with Mr r/iamverysmart
Everyone with a keyboard and net connection thinks they’re unearthing new elements themselves these days by drawing two overlapping circles and jamming whatever they want in it
This is an impossible moral standard. Yours is just as impossible. The FBI and DHS do a lot more than just deport immigrants. Palantir does more than just aid in deporting immigrants. If everything were so black and white the above statement would likely describe what you do as well.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care or ‘object’ to them.
What it does mean is that finger pointing and trying to act like we aren’t part of the problem but ‘they’ i.e. Palantir etc, are, is simply a way of pretending we aren’t complicit.
If borders are a problem, we need to solve that problem by working out a path to eliminating them that actually minimizes harm.
We can’t do that if all our energy is spent on branding people ‘criminals’ and ‘objecting’ to them when we’re part of the same system ourselves.
I think the point here is that Palantir presents itself as not participating in deportations or other widely-considered-distasteful things, and yet they do, and that deserves particular outrage.
I think it's quite reasonable for a company to say we don't know exactly what our supply chain looks like and the only way anyone can build electronics is to use somewhat-questionable supply chains, but we'll do the best we can and and take action if we know of specific instances of harm (e.g., avoid known-bad suppliers), because that's the only way to do better. I think there's a number of food companies and clothing companies that do the same thing about working conditions in their supply chains, too. Palantir isn't doing that - they're speaking out of both sides of their mouth, saying "of course we aren't doing it" while directly being involved. If Palantir were to say, for instance, that they understand their product could be used in this way, they're not interested in providing services for deportations and will cut off customers who are using it for that or indirectly providing services for other organizations doing that, then the public reaction would be very different.
(They could also say "Palantir fully supports the mission of America's law enforcement including ICE and ERO, work here if you want to support law and order and make America great again," and then nobody would accuse them of hiding what they work on.)
No major semiconductor companies really does that that and definitely no tech company using the devices made by those semiconductor companies do that either. And even if they said they did it is still happening, so by the same standard this article is finding Palantir culpable of the deportations, I'd say its fair to find every tech company culpable of child slavery and exploitative mining practices as an example.
If it weren't Palantir it would just be another company. It seems pointless to focus on them specifically or ICE or any of the enforcement agencies for that matter when what seems to be the actual driver is the policies and laws that necessitates their existence. Seems like focusing on changing that is a much better target if you cared more than just assigning moral blame. Whether or not Palantir denies anything doesn't really change much if the outcomes are the same.
This seems like a oversimplistic take on undocumented immigrants. Yes, they just want a better life, but they're also violating immigration laws to do so. Not deporting them sends a signal that violating immigration laws okay and disincentives people from going through the proper channels.
There's room for lots of people and there's going to b a need for more people in this country as the boomers finally retire in their 80s.
On top of that, growing GDP is different from improving average quality of life. If GDP goes up 10% by growing the population 20% through mass immigration, it's plausible quality of life will go down in aggregate. Why is GDP growth the right metric?
You can't have it both ways, unfettered capitalism with continued growth and negative population growth.
GDP is not the right metric to show increase of quality of life, but it is a quick metric to show economic expansion and contraction.
There's a much broader conversation about how we want out system to work.
Yes, there is a downside of having a large “talent” pool of unskilled labor. If you’re a high school dropout, US citizen, you’re competing with this “talent” for handyman jobs, landscaping, house cleaning, etc.
Sure, it’s great to have cheap landscaping, but before you dismantle ICE, go speak with a US citizen who’s doing roofing, and ask if their income would be higher without the illegal immigrants.
Actually fine these businesses, threaten them with being shutdown and actually shut the worst offenders down. They're probably in violation of quite a few labor and tax laws as well, beyond just the issue of who they hire.
They'd also have more access to jobs that tend to effectively require work authorization. You can pay a fellow in cash to work on your roof without going through E-Verify; you can't quite easily pay a fellow in cash to work at a major fast food chain or drive a school bus or be an SRE at a thousand-person tech firm or whatever. So increasing legal immigration may have the effect of reducing the labor supply for house and farm work.
More generally, the economy is a complex thing, and each change you make has many effects. The wage for roofers is determined by both supply (number of potential roofers) and demand - if more people live here, there are quite literally more roofs. While I'm not saying this by itself is likely to save the roofing-labor market, I do think that there are likely broader effects from increasing our pool of legal immigrants besides the most obvious one of depressing wages, and we should look at more than just the extremely short term.
And in the long term, if population growth keeps up, the pool of unskilled labor with domestic work authorization is going to go up on its own. If our economy/society can't handle that, we should be figuring out how to address that anyway.
(This is all a bit orthogonal to dismantling ICE - I do agree that having an underclass of laborers without equal protection under the laws is bad for everyone. I just don't think that ICE is a morally justifiable solution to that problem. We should create more "proper pathways" for people to become documented residents and authorized workers, but until we do so, I don't think having ICE around makes things better.)
There are already laws in place for expanding the talent pool: student visas, work visas, seasonal worker visas, family visas, lottery visas
If more are needed can the allotment be increased instead of relying on black market sources?
Everyone wants an owned house, a nice car, a stable job, and a loving family next to them. You have to earn it. Get in line, haha. If we allow illegal immigration, we're destroying people's chances to stay professionally and legally competitive with each other, and working and integrating yourself in a new country is devalued.
You can't keep living under Damocles' sword of being thrown out at a moment's notice, serving as blackmail for your employer and nemeses. Why not earn the citizenship and the right to vote - to do something about Trump, Biden, and other such politicians? To make sure you can fund your children's college before someone from 4chan doxxes you to the authorities?
I'm sorry I'm surrounded by people who believe in impossible goals like world peace and lack of borders.
Have we thought critically about the positive aspects of border control? Or have we created drawn a moral line in the sand and refused to take up the rationales that may exist and address them? For example, have we put on our thinking caps and thought about how to preserve welfare states in the face of budgets and headcount?
Even if it ultimately becomes accepted as morally right, it certainly does not reflect the current views of all but a tiny minority of US citizens.
Vice is just profiting from creating moral panic here.
I guess the reason why they're involved in this is that the mechanics of deporting someone is a non-trivial data workflow through a bunch of crappy legacy systems, and given they've already got the ETL set up to get the data out, they can create a quick CRUD interface, or use data analysis to find suitable targets. That, plus the fact the company culturally agrees with the deportations, make it a reasonable business for them.
In many ways it's the same role as IBM played in the holocaust. These abhorrent operations are huge logistical undertakings, and that requires investment in tech that governments often aren't able to achieve.
Culture comes from the top, I don't think anyone at Palantir can be surprised that this is the result when Thiel is their leader.
HN'ers are a community detached from the atom world hahah
Why? I don't know where you are coming from, but the world is a big place and there are lots of nice places to go. Granted, there are visa / immigration issues in plenty of countries apart from the US as well, but frankly for decades now the US has been on the decline in every measure of livability: health care, education, incomes, leisure time, commute time, etc, etc. About the only thing the US nominally leads in is a vague notion that you can make more money here than in other countries, but even that is subjective relative to the cost of living and quality of life.
> Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. Mike Godwin himself has also criticized the overapplication of Godwin's law, claiming it does not articulate a fallacy; it is instead framed as a memetic tool to reduce the incidence of inappropriate, hyperbolic comparisons. [...]
> In December 2015, Godwin commented on the Nazi and fascist comparisons being made by several articles about Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying: "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump, or any other politician." [...]
> In June, 2018, Godwin wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times which denied the need to update or amend the rule, and which rejects the idea that whoever invokes Godwin's Law has lost their argument, and which argues that appropriate application of the rule "should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter". [...]
> In June 2019, after Chris Hayes invoked Godwin's Law in a discussion of whether it was appropriate to call the United States's refugee detention centers "concentration camps", Godwin explicitly stated his belief that the term "concentration camps" was appropriate.
Literal genocide is now being practiced at the border.
I'm not sure what part of this comparison is outrageous to you. The material conditions of reality have changed: now we are at a point where these comparisons are apt.
Citation please? The only thing I've heard alleged that would even be close is the woman who had her uterus removed as part of a cancer treatment...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24526130
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24563628
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24571360
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596570
> Accused hospital says just two hysterectomies were performed there (washingtonpost.com)
>Hospital for ICE accused of mass hysterectomies says it only carried out 2 (businessinsider.com)
>No evidence of sterilization of migrant Mexican women, says Mexican minister (reuters.com)
Based on the headlines, I guess it's safe to say that there there isn't a genocide going on?
Specifically, it is very surprising that you're using the hospital's own press release to conclude that no injustice happens on their premises.
Also, people entering from the Mexican border are not all Mexican. Many come from countries further south.
If someone's actually attempting genocide and all they can manage is a few thousand sterilizations, they should be fired for incompetence, too! (Plus, you know, genocide)
Further, is there any evidence that you would be willing to accept that genocide is not happening here? Any source that you'd be willing to commit to accepting?
> And I'm ashamed that you're describing a number of hysterectomies that at most, using laughably high estimates, could number in the thousands, as genocide
Two things here:
1. the number of hysterectomies that a single doctor could perform over, say, 4 years is ~10,000 (at 10/day). That's an extreme case, and relies on almost everything being geared towards rate of surgeries, and so works as an upper bound for what was alleged. (That there was a doctor purposefully sterilizing ICE detainees)
2. 10k sterilizations is not genocide. It would be monstrous, but it's at least 100x too few to count as that IMO given the ~10m illegal immigrants already residing within the US.
> (Which would be horrible! But also leave enough evidence that it would clearly not be one or two cases)
"Which would be horrible!" should require no explanation. The second point here is that if a doctor was somehow able to perform thousands of hysterectomies every year, there would be mountains of evidence for that, and conservatively tens of victims willing to speak up and go to the press, even if only 1% were willing and able.
> If someone's actually attempting genocide and all they can manage is a few thousand sterilizations, they should be fired for incompetence, too! (Plus, you know, genocide)
If this was being orchestrated by someone at ICE somehow, I would expect there to be more "effective" and less likely to be exposed methods of sterilization available to a determined administrator. Thus, two reasons to fire them - one is that they're an utter piece of shit for attempting genocide, and the second is that they're fucking incompetent. A sort of "awful taste AND awful execution" scenario.
> Further, is there any evidence that you would be willing to accept that genocide is not happening here? Any source that you'd be willing to commit to accepting?
This should also be self explanatory. Is there a news source that you would trust if it said that there was no evidence of genocide here? If MSNBC or the NY Times said that this was all a hoax, would you accept that? Or the governments of Guatemala, Honduras, etc? I ask this because you've rejected denials from ICE, the hospital, and the Mexican government - what other sources do you expect to be reliable?
If your belief isn't falsifiable, then I know not to expect any engagement from you.
> Please, I implore you, read your comment again. It is so callous as to be near-sociopathic. Yours is very much not a healthy view into morality.
I've clarified everything there that I think might have been unclear. Is it less sociopathic to you now?
This misses the context behind the relocations. In the case of the holocaust, they were legally living there before being relocated. In the case of undocumented immigrants, they illegally moved there, and are now being moved back.
Removing people from their homes is a little different from sending them back home when they enter your country illegally.
> Literal genocide is now being practiced at the border.
No, it isn’t.
Deportation of illegal aliens (let's not mince the words with euphemisms like "undocumented immigrants") is the right thing to do and any organization which can help ICE/USCIS/DHS/Whatever else organization, is doing a big service to the US.
I, as an US citizen taxpayer, am not required to hold the pot for those illegal aliens to get better healthcare, better education for their children and better earnings than what they can do in their home countries. At the end of the day, they are not paying taxes (don't start with the sales tax or ITIN rhetoric, I know those and those arguments don't hold water) but using the resources more than the taxpayers do. At the end of the day, my taxes are going to support their lifestyles, instead of coming back to me in the name of services needed.
And don;t even get me started with the states like my home state California. They use public tax money to defend illegal alien cockroaches against deportation, which is what they should face, in the legal boundaries.
Right, because no US born citizen has ever done that.
Dude. There's always some segment of society that is going to try to scam or that is going to wallow around unwilling to provide for themselves. You can either get over it or you can do what our system does over and over again and make it miserable for everyone.
While you slander those who come from south of you, I could just as easily talk about the "cockroaches" from California who have "invaded" Cascadia, bringing with them an alien way of life and running up our cost of living.
Point being, while you are busy spreading your venomous bile, never forget that we are all immigrants from somewhere and that to someone we are "the other." Sooner we realize we are all human and we'd better all start working together, the sooner we might actually figure out sane immigration policies. Better move quick because Mother Nature is mad and there's a whole lot of places that aren't going to be fun to live in the next century.
Cool story tho