The same people who are today saying, "The Syrian refugee crisis is just like the Jews in WWII, only racists could not let them in"* are the people who spend most days saying, "The state established by the Jewish refugees from WWII is a racist apartheid hell run by religious fanatics."
And the same people, who are today saying that only racism or Islamophobia could account for not wanting to admit vast numbers of Syrians to America are the ones who -- for years now -- have been loudly celebrating how impending demographic changes from mass immigration are going to destroy American conservatives and win the culture wars for liberals forever.
Also, that it's impossible to undo mass immigration, and we need to hurry up and give them citizenship. So they can destroy your values. Racists.
The effect of all this has been that we now have a leading American candidate for President openly talking about "deportation squads" going house to house to search for illegal immigrants. How sure are you that this fire needs a little more gasoline?
Let's help the Syrian refugees. Let's give them food, clothes, supplies, and a military mission that will ensure they have a home to return to. Let's help them rebuild that home once they're free to return to it. I'll be happy to go myself and be a direct part of the effort.
It's disingenuous, though, to plan on the one hand to use immigration to overrun your domestic political opponents -- and then claim that the only reason to oppose yet more immigration is some kind of racism. You're the ones who made this an all-important political issue that touches every aspect of American culture and values. If you insist on throwing more gasoline onto the fire you yourselves built, it's likely as not that you're going get burned worse than anyone. Imagine how much you'll enjoy an America with deportation squads led by President Donald Trump.
Then, when you're done reflecting on that image, stop throwing gas cans around. Let's address this problem in a way that doesn't further damage the peace of the American republic.
It doesn't really matter what the zombies are saying because their Leftist overlords can program them to say whatever the Left wants.
ReplyDeleteThey're tools. Treating them as humans complicates and destroys the system, which is already broken.
In a hierarchy, even if the people carrying out the orders disagree, they will still most likely obey their orders. You can't stop an organization by stopping a few people at the bottom. That's not how it works.
All this talk talk propaganda is mostly smoke and mirrors.
I've seen the "just like the Jews in WWII" meme all over the place, sometimes being repeated by peple who are intelligent to know better.
ReplyDeleteI'm fairly familiar with that period of history, and I'm pretty sure that there were not a lot of rabbis preaching violent attacks against countries accepting refugees.
They're tools. Treating them as humans complicates and destroys the system...
ReplyDeleteThey are humans, however, Spock. Treating them as human is an important thing to do even if you think they're being manipulated like tools.
Even if you think it will achieve nothing in terms of reaching a human heart, Clausewitz talks about attacking the enemy's strategy by explaining it.
... and I'm pretty sure that there were not a lot of rabbis preaching violent attacks against countries accepting refugees.
No, indeed. The bad-acting rabbis of the period were guilty chiefly of going along with the Nazis, rather than trying to conduct violent "whatever Jews would call jihad" against their hosts. The fact that we don't even have a word for 'whatever...' shows how different the cases are.
Well put. We say our lines, even though few are listening. We do not hope to convince the many, but the few. And to encourage each other.
ReplyDeleteWe do not need to obliterate the arguments of our opponents so much as create battlespace for the suite of ideas that liberates us from them.
As the saying goes, if they didn't have double standards, they wouldn't have any standards at all.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that I would push back with comments about Jews in 1938 not being terrorists.
ReplyDeleteOther useful and more subtle distinctions are that they were coming over prior to the accepted start of WWII in September 1939 so they don't represent a generic German population trying to escape a war zone. They were specifically trying to escape the Nazi pogroms begun in 1933. They were more like the Copts and Yazidis than the current refugee flow from Syria.
I think it's also useful to point out that far from attempting to override the sentiment against accepting Jewish refugees, FDR's administration actively tried to keep them out, hiding behind the restricitve immigration quotas to avoid angering isolationist voters.
I don't know that I would push back with comments about Jews in 1938 not being terrorists.
ReplyDeleteOther useful and more subtle distinctions are that they were coming over prior to the accepted start of WWII in September 1939 so they don't represent a generic German population trying to escape a war zone. They were specifically trying to escape the Nazi pogroms begun in 1933. They were more like the Copts and Yazidis than the current refugee flow from Syria.
I think it's also useful to point out that far from attempting to override the sentiment against accepting Jewish refugees, FDR's administration actively tried to keep them out, hiding behind the restricitve immigration quotas to avoid angering isolationist voters.
Also of note is that the Nazis weren't openly talking about sending over saboteurs and partisans disguised as Jewish refugees. This whole situation might be different if we had ANY confidence at all in the current administration's ability to identify (or even that it cares to identify) the difference between a genuine refugee displaced by violence, an economic migrant who's just using the refugee crisis as an opportunity, and a Daesh terrorist.
ReplyDeleteTreating them as human is an important thing to do even if you think they're being manipulated like tools.
ReplyDeleteWhat matters to a predictive model is how accurate the predicted results match the actual results.
In that sense, it doesn't matter how the internal box treats or labels the mechanism in question or the subjects in question, if the result is accurate and/or useful.
If a democracy treats slaves as full time voters, that democracy will result in a predicted consequence. If that consequence never happens, then either there were no full time voters, or the slaves weren't slaves. But that is merely a logical approximation/justification, what matters is the predicted results vs the actual results.
If logic and human reasoning fails to explain why the actual results comply or diverge with the predicted results, then the model is broken or human logic is broken. Either way, one must throw out the trash and replace it with what works.