Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Nobody’s “existence” has been politicized in the 30 years I’ve been in America.[1] I remember during 2015-2016 my friends were freaking out asking if I was worried if Trump would be sending people from Muslim countries (like me) to internment camps. I thought they were being completely absurd. I guess it wasn’t just me: a third of Muslims voted for Trump in 2020. People don’t do that when their “very existence has been politicized.”

Government policies may be unfair, unconstitutional, or discriminatory to different groups of people. But that’s not politicizing people’s “very existence.” That sort of rhetoric is just a way to dial up the temperature of political debates by equating any negative impacts with existential harm. People have a right to freely debate things like who the government will let into the country, what benefits it will provide to whom, etc.

[1] Except unborn children, whose very existence has literally been politicized.

What about deportation of undocumented immigrants? Isn't their existence in this country politicized?

People are being killed by gun violence, police violence, gang violence. Isn't it fair for people affected by these things to feel their lives have become political footballs?

> What about deportation of undocumented immigrants? Isn't their existence in this country politicized?

Their presence in a country they’ve entered illegally is the subject of political debate, but that’s not equivalent to a threat to their “very existence.” Calling it that is an attempt to emotionalize a basic function of sovereign nations: policing their borders. It’s something every country does—including the countries from where these undocumented immigrants came.

> People are being killed by gun violence, police violence, gang violence. Isn't it fair for people affected by these things to feel their lives have become political footballs?

If you’ve been killed by gun violence or police violence or gang violence, then you’re dead. If you haven’t, then you’re debating government policy, not the fact of your “very existence.” Even mundane government policy has life or death implications. People running red lights kills six to ten times as many people each year as mass shootings. But framing a debate over stoplight timing in terms of peoples’ “existence” would be a way to shut down rational policy debate.

As an Asian person, I’m much more likely to be killed or attacked by a repeat offender than by the police. But that doesn’t mean I can shut down a discussion of eliminating bail by saying it’s a “threat to my very existence.”

> If you’ve been killed by gun violence or police violence or gang violence, then you’re dead

Unless it’s your family/friends who have been? “How was your weekend Mary?” “My husband/kid was shot in the back by police”

I find it sad how your arguing how people’s existence can’t be political or if they are it “doesn’t matter” because they unborn or dead while neglecting people who would still be affected daily like family or a mother who wants to get an abortion but can’t/has to deal with the assholes out front protesting

People on parole and bail kill more unarmed people than cops do.

Is any talk of bail or parole reform an existential threat that denies people's right to exist?

Source?

And no? I don’t think I gave any indication it would?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

About 80 / year police shootings of unarmed individuals.

There were about 19,000 homicides last year.

1 in 55 people people are on parole or probation. So even if we make the ludicrous assumption that people on parole or probation have exact same rate of violent crime as non probation or paroled you still end up with 345 homicides by people on parole or probation.

I assume a rate 2-3x the base rate for population would be a completely reasonable assumption, giving us ~10x more homicides by people on probation/parole.

The point is if police shootings rise to being an existential threat, than criminal justice reform is at least a much of an existential threat.

the very first sentence there is "985 people have been shot and killed by police in the past year"

and the rest of your comment is conjecture and assumptions with no facts to back them up

I said unarmed. Which statistic do you think is meaningfully wrong?

Based on the way you are using terms, you are correct, nobody's existence can be politicized. If they are alive (although possibly sick, in jail, or deported), they exist so there is nothing to discuss. If they are dead, they are dead, so there is obviously nothing to discuss.

Putting those semantics aside, the point was, some people's lives are affected by politics (I'd argue all are) and you can't expect them not to talk about their lives, including the effect of policy and politics on them. Well, you can, but apparently 2/3 of your workforce will decide that's not cool and leave.

There have been times when people’s very existence has been a political issue. That’s not happening in 21st century America.

Of course people’s “lives are affected by politics”—often very significantly. That’s a very different statement than saying people’s “very existence is politicized.” That’s just a rhetorical device to exaggerate the personal impact of political issues.

I would agree with that. People exaggerate at times, and you're correct that it can lead to unclear conversation. One of the worst parts is that bad actors can seize on a couple of words and detail an entire line of reasoning based on it.

"Existence in this country" is completely different from "existence," even if the two ideas happen to share a word.

Not really if you're limited to talking about a particular country.

Like I guess you could argue it's the difference between ethnic cleansing internally and invading a neighbor to engage in ethnic cleansing, but that's sort of not a hugely important distinction.

I think they're arguing the distinction between "I'm not allowed to live in the u.s. so I have to live somewhere else" and "I'm not allowed to live because I shot in front of a firing squad".

Which would seem like a very important distinction if it was my existence.

Does that distinction really matter if you're already here in the US? Where else do you go?

I'm trying to argue in good faith but you're literally asking does the distinction being having to move and being murdered matter.

To move where?

This thread was in part, but not solely, about undocumented immigrants, and sure maybe they have a place they can legally be sent to. But the same argument has been used for racial separation ("No, we don't want to subjugate black people, we just want to have a white ethnostate where the black people will be forced to move". The part not said aloud of of course, being what happens if someone wishes to stay where they have lived their whole life).

So yes, I think the distinction between "will be kicked out by force" or "will simply be shot in the street" can be a lot more tenuous than you're suggesting.

But even still, if we're discussing any group that isn't undocumented immigrants (or even potentially citizens whom the president wanted to strip that right from) the question of "where do they go" becomes even more important, because there usually isn't a place they can go.

Do you seriously not understand the distinction between racial segregation and enforcing immigration laws or do you just not believe in nation states?

I'm unclear on what exactly you mean by nation states. That term usually implies a cohesive culture shared by the population, and as such is more normally applied to smaller ethnically homogenous nations (think Spain or Japan or South Korea) and not a large ethnically and racially diverse nation liked the US. In fact the US (with it's vastly different culture and racial makeup between say Hawaii and Nebraska and Georgia) is usually the prime example of a country that isn't a nation state.

I think what you're actually asking is if I feel that it is just to enforce immigration laws on people already in the country, and generally speaking no, I don't think deportation is a just punishment for trying to be a productive member of society but overstaying a visa or similar.

You’re mixing up nation states and ethnostates. The US is a nation state and like every other nation it gets to decide who is allowed to take up residence there. The fact it’s not an ethnostate just means it doesn’t make those decisions in order to preserve an existing ethnic homogeneity. That doesn’t deprive it of the right to decide on what terms foreigners get to live there.

Deportation isn’t a “punishment.” It’s restoration of the status quo ante in response to someone entering illegally. If you build a house on someone else’s land, they can force you to tear it down. That’s not a punishment, it’s just undoing the effect of the illegal act.

> You’re mixing up nation states and ethnostates.

I'm not, using common definitions. They just happen to usually be the same because culture and ethnicity are often very tightly coupled.

The factors you're talking about (border sovereignty and determination of citizenship/residency) are all related to being a "state" and have relatively little to do with being a nation, which is just a shared culture. A nation state is the term for a state, the political entirely, whose population shares a broadly homogenous culture. If you choose to define the US as a nation-state, then it blunts the "nation" portion to the point of redundancy, as the culture of sharing a government is enough to define a nation. Do a bit of research here and at a minimum you'll find that the US being a nation state is widely disputed. But we can agree to disagree because again, everything you're talking about is political determination related to statehood. Nation is irrelevant.

> Deportation isn’t a “punishment.” It’s restoration of the status quo ante in response to someone entering illegally

This is weak semantics. A goal of retribution is not a requirement for some act to be a punishment. It is simply "the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon a group or individual, meted out by an authority as a response and deterrent to a particular action or behavior that is deemed undesirable or unacceptable". Defacto it is a punishment. But this again doesn't matter even if you choose to find it not a punishment, it is still unjust. It may also be a return to the status quo, but so too is, for example, returning someone to prison for a parole violation, and I think you'd be hard pressed to define that as anything but a punishment.

> If you build a house on someone else’s land, they can force you to tear it down.

I'm dubious of this. You likely could not compel me to tear it down. You could sue to cover the costs, but if I had no money there are limits on what you could do.

I'm contending that deportation is similar. It, at a minimum, is not a just way to "restore the status quo".

> Where else do you go?

The country of which you’re a citizen and where you’re legally allowed to reside?

Where should a trans US citizen with no other legal residency go?

Their ability to live safely is coupled fully to their ability to live safely in the us. Immigration was one, but not the only, example GP mentioned.

Has there been any serious discussion around kicking trans people out of America? I haven't seen any.

Clearly they mean around the "live safely" part.

Transgender people are about as safe as anyone else in the u.s.

Trans people are a group that isn't as safe as others: https://www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-trans-and...

44 transgender people killed last year.

19,000 people killed last year

0.6% of the population is trans according to wikipedia.

So we should expect 114 trans murder victims if they had the same rate of being a victim of homicide at the standard population

Looks like they're safer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Uni....

Also I said about as safe. Your risk of being involved in a homicide is ~1%. You'd need to be at a much higher risk of being killed before this impacts your overall safety.

And if which you may not speak the language, have no known relation, and be completely unable to support yourself. Where would you go if you got deported?

Where would you go if you were deported? If I were deported, my life as I knew it would effectively be over. Family, friends, job, all gone.

It's not the same as being dead, but it's analogous to being imprisoned or incapacitated.

I disagree. If you are deported to a country which you may not speak the language, have no known relation, and be completely unable to support yourself, your life is effectively over. You can rebuild a new life from scratch, but depending on how you define existence, I think it's reasonable to say your old life no longer exists. Conversely, you could say you still exist after you die, because the master that made up your body hasn't exited the closed system of the universe.

To make it for home a little more, I'll ask, where would you go if you got deported?

Trans peoples existence certainly has been politicized. In many cases they are de facto not allowed to exist.

> Except unborn children, whose very existence

To use your same disingenuous measure of argument, no their existence isn't politicized, whether or not they are "persons" (or alive) is. Fetuses quite obviously exist, everyone agrees on that.

The HN guidelines suggest you steelman the arguments of people who you respond to. I don't think you're doing that if your entire argument boils down to a weak rhetorical disagreement about how precisely to define "very existence". Since certain forms of discriminatory policy are politicizing people's very existence.

I also don't think people ever widely suggested Muslim people's existence had been politicized, so that's simply a strawperson.

Im pro choice and think the banning of gender reassignment in children is bad.

But you're arguing that deciding whether or not a fetus or unborn child is a person is not an existential issue, but when someone can choose to get gender reassignment is.

One is very literally an argument about personhood and the right to terminate and the other is about children's and parents right to choose appropriate medical care.

I'm not. I'm arguing that they're the same situation. I think there are other factors that make the issue of gender reassignment completely unlike abortion, but yes they're both existential. GP was claiming only abortion was and I pointed out that that was logically inconsistent.

The differences are that regulating abortion harms a third party, the woman, while allowing gender reassignment doesn't.

> Trans peoples existence certainly has been politicized

To expand on this - If a trans person has a coworker who consistent and deliberately mis-genders them, there's no way for the person to have a discussion about it that's not political.

Even simpler: if the existence of trans, let alone non-binary, people is a contentious issue in politics, there's no way for a non-binary (or GNC binary trans) person to state their pronouns without it being a political act.

The same is true for people in same-sex relationships. You can't just mention your spouse like a straight person would without it being political.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com