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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I believe in radically open borders. I'm certainly not saying I agree with Soros on everything. I'm simply saying that people who believe he has sinister intentions are staking out a fairly extreme position.

It comes back to a tendency that I feel more and more is the most pernicious influence of all in the public sphere - the inability of people to believe that those on the other side of a debate are reasonable, rational, intelligent people who are doing their best to solve difficult problems. We (and I include myself here) have a deep-rooted impulse to characterise the other side as either charlatans, crooks or imbeciles.

Taking someone seriously who has reached different conclusions to oneself or has a different worldview triggers such cognitive dissonance that we'd prefer to ascribe to them either nefarious motives or else some kind of mental deficiency.

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This isn't a morality issue. Soros is a very clever, rational, and self serving individual. This is currently the model citizen, as we are all supposed to rationally optimize our own individual utility within the free market.

Soros is a financial speculator, so he literally makes money off chaos. He made his billions by betting against the Bank of England. Everything he is doing to destabilize Europe and the West makes perfect sense from his point of view. He is simply rationally maximizing his own utility given the tools at his disposal. This isn't immoral, its rationally amoral.

Soros is the perfect counterexample to libertarian fantasies of rational self-interest-run societies. Because it becomes very clear very quickly that one person's self interest is another person's dystopian nightmare.

Childish good and evil narratives don't apply here. It is just a very clear case of good intentions causing immense harm. When there is profit to be made off chaos, you are economically incentivizing it, and will receive more of it.

Again - you're making quite a leap here.

All his public statements are about promoting stability, democracy and the open society. If your hypothesis is that wants to promote chaos to help him profit from speculation there is no way to do that without also ascribing to him direct intentionality on the matter. He can't 'unconsciously' be creating chaos and 'accidentally' profiting. The cause-and-effect feedback look is too tortuous for this to be a rational explanation for his actions.

So pick your position. He's either a duplicitous puppet-master with no sincere motivation aside from increasing his own wealth - or he is a sincere believer in freedom and democracy - even if he is deluded or incorrect about the long-term effects of his actions.

Note that the second position allows you to believe he still wants to increase his personal wealth - it allows for the possibility that he is a hypocrite to a greater or lesser degree. But there is clear blue water between that and many of the Soros-theories that sound to me like barking mad wingnut fodder.

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