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Comment by drawnwren | Hacker News Reader

> literal ethnic cleansing

I get that you think this is good rhetoric. It isn't. Literal ethnic cleansing would mean that ethnicity alone was the deciding factor for deportation. When you use rhetoric like this, you polarize anyone who doesn't agree with you. I honestly believe that the current marching orders for the Right are to try and stoke the Left into as many of these extreme generalizations as possible to polarize the middle.

> material physical threat to people's lives

I'm curious why a no fly zone in Syria and death-by-missile-du-jour don't get this same classification? I dropped bombs on men, women, and children for 8 years and for some reason it didn't seem like they cared that we wrote "hope" and "change" on the side of them.

> maim, kidnap, and remove from society

Really? This is absurd. You just wrote that purpose of ICE is to maim immigrants... this is not logic.

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No, you're right, the fact that Donald Trump literally launched his campaign by painting all Mexican immigrants as murderers and rapists is a coincidence, the question of who gets deported and why is purely a technical, legal one having nothing to do with ethnicity

You responded to zero of my arguments. I said nothing about Trump or Mexicans.

edit: Unless you actually believe that the only piece of information required to deport someone is that they are of Mexican ethnicity? That's provably, laughably false - but that might be the point you were trying to make?

Reply to my own post because I rethought this after HN edit times are allowed. My major point here is not advocating for either side of the political discussion, it is this: When you use extreme rhetoric and attempt to exclude people from discussion because their views do not align with your own - you lose elections. I am very aware that the far Right's rhetoric is very similar to your own. _However_, you don't have the same base that they do. You're trying to cobble an electoral college majority together from a different place and falling into the trap of polarizing rhetoric is, imho, a bad idea for the progressive left.

Obama was able to do it in 2008 and 2012 because he was an _amazing_ statesman. It's my personal belief that we may not see another person as skilled in public speaking/appeasing the public again in our lifetime. I supported him both times despite my personal belief that he did not move the Overton Window very far in either direction.

What I do recommend is to take your more extreme rhetoric and see if it can be applied to your own positions (in many cases it can, in some it cannot) and try to determine for yourself if you are falling trap to 'regurgitated rhetoric' or legitimately offering critical thinking.

tldr; You persuade no one by taking a theistic approach to reason and perhaps alienate more than you convert.

You're making a mistake assuming that I'm using rhetoric to win elections or build a base.

I actually believe, because there is ample evidence to support it, that this administration's goal is ethnic cleansing via mass deportations, immigration controls, and mass incarceration.

I believe anybody who is ignoring this evidence, and anybody who is able to compartmentalize the grave, mortal danger that members of targeted minority groups now find themselves in as "just politics", actually does not consider those targeted minority groups as fully human.

For whatever reason, you think that's so extreme that I couldn't possibly actually believe it. But I'm being really straightforward. That's what I believe. There's ample evidence to back up those beliefs. I don't care if I alienate some people by saying what I believe is true.

Trump's mass deportation machine is ramping up now. I and thousands of others have trained to intervene directly in deportations, and those networks have already been mobilized to prevent people from being kidnapped from their own homes. That's the base I'm interested in building. And conveying anything less than the full scale of the terror that targeted minority groups are facing, or asking for anything less than the assistance they are calling for, is a mistake.

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