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Comment by random314 | Hacker News Reader

> Incorrect. It’s totally fine to not get along with other people—and certainly to not want to share a democratic polity with them—based on cultural differences.

I like how Republicans act as master and judge and issue the judgement "incorrect" and go on to adopt a blatantly racist stance under the currently fashionable republican sound bite of "unacceptable cultural differences", while immediately switching to the directly opposite sound bite "diversity of ideas" without flinching. Republicans have a reputation for being racist for very good reasons.

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The actual conservative position, at least my interpretation of it, is something like, the whole point of civilization and being alive is to reach the height of human potential, build great things and make new discoveries. Cultural homogeneity and intellectual diversity are two sides of that coin. When everyone has the same basic values and assumptions in a high-trust society, it frees everyone to have the tolerance of eccentricity and the tolerance of the scariness of exploring new positions that you need in order to do anything great.

Liberals reading into this and seeing racism is itself an example of this phenomenon. They hear something like "diversity of ideas" and instantly a big red moral stop sign shows up in their head. It shows how when everyone has fundamentally different values, and everyone's different sets of moral landmines are overlaid on the same map, it becomes basically impossible to walk through the space of ideas without sooner or later stepping on one.

Who said anything about republicans? I’m an immigrant from a country that exists because it split off from another country due to cultural differences (even though nearly everyone in the story was a “brown” Muslim). It would be hypocritical as hell for me to complain that Trump voters in Wisconsin feel the same way.

Nearly all the people immigrating to the US come from countries that believe the same thing as republicans: one cultural group has no moral obligation to invite another cultural group over the border to share democratic governance of their country with them. Indians believe that, Chinese people believe that. Japanese people, Koreans, everyone in the Middle East. Mexicans would flip out if mass immigration from Guatemala was flipping elections in their country.

Ironically, the liberal American view of this reduces to the assertion that a handful of mostly European descended people in the developed world are correct about the nature of nationhood while everyone else is wrong.

> I’m an immigrant from a country that exists because it split off from another country due to cultural differences

Dude, stop bringing up Bangladesh as context for anything and everything. What you are calling "cultural differences" in 1971, was simply called genocide because of racism by everyone else.

But you are going for the racism and genocide is A-ok, as it's just an expression of "cultural differences". You can continue with your word play in your replies again.

I don't even think liberal Americans believe that. People who advocate for unrelenting immigration would probably be very upset if Russians were coming across the border (or some European, culturally conservative Christian-esque group) by the millions. I would argue those liberals are lying when they talk about what nationhood is. They believe in it, just not the one they live in.

Every now and then you can see glimpses of that. After Muslims went for George W. Bush in 2000, The New Republic of all places wrote an article accusing Grover Norquist of having ties to radical Islam because his wife is Arab: https://newrepublic.com/article/83799/norquist-radical-islam...

If Hispanics and Muslims were coming here and voting their social values instead of their economic ones you can bet the narrative would be different.

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