The subtext here is that "Bzeek, a quiet, devout Libyan-born Muslim" would not be allowed to immigrate to the United States today given the "Muslim Ban" Executive Order.
That's the problem with emotional arguments; in a world of seven billion people, anybody's emotional defenses can be trivially overwhelmed in either direction on any topic. Every second you've been alive there has been incomprehensible-to-you amounts of joy and sorrow. It's not a valid argument to selectively scoop some of that out in a particular direction that someone happens to like, and you are being played every time someone does it to you.
To take an example of the latter, conservatives frequently cite the case of Kate Steinle, who was allegedly murdered in San Francisco a couple years back by an illegal immigrant who had been repeatedly deported but kept coming back. (I say allegedly because the defendant claims he stole the gun in a simple crime of opportunity and the fatal discharge was accidental. No motivation for the shooting was apparent at the time, so arguably it was a case of manslaughter rather than murder. Anyway...)
Now this case is frequently mentioned to highlight the supposed danger of allowing illegal immigrants to wander about freely. A quantitative analysis reveals that immigrants, even illegal ones, tend to commit fewer crimes on a per-capita basis than their legal neighbors, so hyping up this case to frighten people is misleading.
On the other hand, all that quantitative analysis isn't much comfort to all those who suffer when someone is killed, and ignoring that (because we can't easily quantify how sad a given tragedy is) undermines credibility in the quantitative approach because it runs counter to the fact of human experience. Soviet-style communism is a good example of crushing individual life through an unyielding adherence to the quantitative data preferred by bureaucrats, and we could find many other tragic examples from other political systems without having to look very hard.
tl;dr only looking at the aggregate data throws the baby out with the bathwater because we are emotional animals and emotional experience matters too.
I'd be interested in the source on that. I'm also curious if they're taking a blanket average, or if they account for the fact that a huge proportion of American crime occurs within a few square miles of blighted urban terrain in Chicago, DC, LA and Baltimore. For most people, such 'average' crime stats are irrelevant in the same way that skydiving death stats are irrelevant to someone who never skydives.
>we are emotional animals and emotional experience matters too.
But which emotional experience matters?
There are millions of relevant emotional experiences being had. You can't relate to all of them on an emotional level. So, the only question becomes which emotional experiences you choose to privilege above all the others and synchronize your own emotions to.
As parent indicated, this ultimately means surrendering your own motivational choices to whoever has the power to put emotional imagery in front of your monkey brain.
You become a slave to power, used to fulfill the goals of others, tugged blindly toward the beliefs they choose by the leash of your own pathological empathy.
As for which emotional experiences matter, you should evaluate a variety of them, including ones that make you uncomfortable. If you're not in a constant state of mild-self doubt or can't easily articulate opponents' line of reasoning then you're in a bubble.
As parent indicated, this ultimately means surrendering your own motivational choices to whoever has the power to put emotional imagery in front of your monkey brain.
No it doesn't. You are perfectly free to seek out other points of view and emotional experiences that you find unpleasant or distasteful. In the context of politics, one obvious reason to do so is to avoid being put on the defensive by an argument you haven't encountered before. I'm pretty far left but I probably spend more time reading conservative forums and blogs than liberal ones.
allegedly murdered
True, but the policy should be judged on its real costs and benefits. So far, the administration has consistently emphasized and exaggerated the supposed security risks of the status quo to make an argument from necessity for drastic changes. I'm trying to be neutral in describing this but I think it's fair to say that the claim that bad people are 'pouring in' to the USA is an exaggeration.
You're being kind. As far as I can understand, the legal argument (i.e., the 'official' argument) is that they don't need to justify their actions in any way to a court.
Look at the terrible thread it spawned.
If they had left it at the person's name and good deeds, then we'd probably all be here discussing/praising that such a wonderful individual exists. No matter their race, gender, religion or nationality.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969
There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433
There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969
When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463480
On downsides of the Political Detox Week experiment: there are two comments in the thread.
AFAIK, this was a good scenario for a temporary ban. More strict anti-terror regulations are announced to be coming, and to prevent people from trying to get in before that ban, you have a temporary ban.
It made sense to me.
One way of interpreting that is that it's easy to sell an unpalatable something as a temporary thing because it sounds "corrective" rather than a final decision.
The entire refugee program, worldwide, is suspended for 120 days, and may be resumed on a country-by-country basis when the administration is satisfied that it is in the national interest.
Right now, it appears that the administration won't even defend it and instead will issue a more narrowly defined EO.