Comment by ivape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivape | Hacker News Reader

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The people that come here legally don't really build anything of significant value when you compare it to entire immigrant communities. Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, Irish, you name it, they build vast amounts of culture and businesses that get integrated into America. Even if you give me 2 million of the smartest legal immigrants, they will pale in comparison to what large immigrant communities offer to the fabric of America. This is deeply American issue, you either get it or you don't.

Just Apu from the Simpsons is only possible due to our immigration. Just the very fucking iconic cartoon character. This is not from legal immigration. Taco Tuesdays, every Irish pub, like, it sounds silly, but what they offer America is ten fold. I do not care about the best and the brightest, give us your tired and poor.

The American right-wing reeks of elitism (soft language for racist/xenophobic) and it is the antithesis of the American spirit and dream. I'm not with it.

This will be one of my final posts on this topic because I believe we are only in month five, and have 3.5 years to go. I pray the midterms are a landslide, and I pray the next Democrat grants Amnesty. See you all on the other side, because to me this issue is no different than the anit-gay marriage bullshit from the 2000s that we wiped the table clean of once and for all. We are a nation of immigrants and we will be so until eternity.

> American right-wing reeks of elitism

Common notion, but based in ignorance. I've found that the left wing is more idealistic, but in the sense that they have chosen not to learn from history and rely on immediate emotional values. The right wing sees second order effects and acts on them.

Thus, you get the left calling the right heartless/immoral/racist, and the right calling the left idiots.

> The right wing sees second order effects and acts on them.

It’s hard to take this one at good faith. The right wing is very publicly melting down the CDC for glue while the second order effects of a preventable measles epidemic spreads through the country. Is there a more targeted claim you want to make?

The right wing had a big problem with the role the CDC played in the authoritarianism of the COVID era. Now they're melting down a weapon of that authoritarianism. What's more important, preserving civil rights by preventing authoritarianism, or a single epidemic? Gotta think long term here.

I suspect that you merely dislike the authoritarian things the government is currently doing; I dislike that the government is authoritarian. We are not the same.

Learning from history and still ending up on the side of almost every issue that is considered unspeakably cruel a generation later.

Slavery, segregation, women’s suffrage, child labor protections, labor rights, Social Security, interracial marriage, homosexuality, civil rights legislation, same-sex marriage, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, prohibition, environmental protections, public education expansion, healthcare reform, voting rights expansion, immigration rights, disability rights, reproductive rights, minimum wage laws, workers’ compensation laws.

>> rely on immediate emotional values....Thus, you get the left calling the right heartless/immoral/racist

> considered unspeakably cruel

You're not disagreeing on any pragmatic basis, just the emotional one. Like I said.

They gave you a whole list of pragmatic policy differences, are you ignoring them or in agreement?

No, they gave a list of policy differences - and justified them with an emotional argument: "cruel". They said nothing about the pragmatic justification of them. Which is exactly my point: the left tends to operate on ideological emotional values.

They could have said things like 'reproductive rights leads to X goods for the populace' or 'prohibition was a net positive in Y ways' or 'minimum wage laws are shown to improve GDP by Z amt on average' - but they didn't. They used an emotional argument. Like I said they would.

They used examples where almost every reasonable American knows what the right and wrong side of history ended up being. He doesn’t need to teach us with detailed policy that slavers ended up on the wrong side of history — we all know.

The point he's responding to is about epistemology - how the conclusion is come to, not what the conclusion is.

And 'wrong side of history' (bandwagon fallacy) and references to 'cruelty' (appeal to emotions) is really, really bad epistemology.

"Not to learn from history"? We're in the twilight zone now. It's the right wing that is currently enacting tariffs, scapegoating immigrants, pushing for appeasement in Ukraine, etc.

The Republican party traded logic for populism long ago.

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