Comment by RankingMember | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RankingMember | Hacker News Reader

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If you're a refugee and someone posts that, how would you feel? Would you consider it a personal attack? Someone challenges your very existence in a place you escaped to only because the circumstances you came from were so dire you felt you had no choice but to uproot your life and leave the land you were born into...and that's not personal?

You can hold whatever selfish, "fuck you, got mine- try being born into better circumstances next time, losers!" opinion you want. Your free speech doesn't mean everyone else has to listen intently and earnestly and keep themselves from thinking you're being an a-hole for holding the opinions you do. It also doesn't mean some private social media outlets can't tell you to piss off for posting them in a forum about metal music. There are plenty of places online where you can post such an opinion and be back-slapped and congratulated; lamenting that one takes a preemptive stance against opinions you hold is pretty tender for one who takes such a cold-hearted stance against refugees.

The same could be said of every other political stance to take, no? Socially, or economically.

See how libertarians see taxes. They could also write some melancholic paragraphs like yours. "Imagine you're a hard, honest worker and someone told you part of your money is not yours, you have to give up some of it and give it to the government. Would you consider it a personal attack? Someone challenges your very right to have your own property... and that's not personal?"

The thing is that, yes, wanting to reduce the amount of immigrants (for example) is a mainstream political stance. Brexit happened over less! We should be able to have and express our own political ideas as long as we don't go out of our way to harass people over them.

This is not about that Mastodon instance in particular, since most instances have the same left-leaning rules.

The difference between our two stories is that one is about your property and one is about your right to exist. Surely you see that these are not equivalent. One is telling someone "I don't want you here, so go back home to be murdered by the warlords you fled" and the other is "give me some of your money otherwise carry on".

>The thing is that, yes, wanting to reduce the amount of immigrants (for example) is a mainstream political stance.

We were talking about refugees, not immigrants.

If you don't pay your taxes you go to jail, which in some places could be in the same ballpark as whatever is actually happening in Syria (I don't really believe in what the UN says).

Most refugees are economic migrants, as their going to the most favourable countries instead of the closest ones shows: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/europe-grapples-distincti...

Anyway I'm over with this, I was defending free speech, this "refugee" charade is already finished anyway.

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