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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> Culture is a real thing that exists, and it’s okay to prefer your own!

Yes, it is. There is quite the leap from "preferring your own" to lying about a specific group are doing something morally objectionable, in order to reinforce your campaign's anti-immigration messaging, though.

And yes, it is racist to lie about a group of people you don't like to make them sound worse so that other people don't like them too.

Like it was racist when Nazis said that Jews control the world and ate children and whatever nonsense you can think of.

Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism. The couch fucker treated them differently, by lying that they specifically are eating pets.

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> Targeting a specific group of people's immutable characteristics to slander them to paint them negatively fits your "original" definition of racism

Nobody targeted anyone’s immutable characteristics. If you object to 10,000 Appalachians being resettled in your New England town, that’s not “racism.” It’s an objection based on not wanting them to do to your town what they did to their hometowns in Appalachia. It’s about peoples’ culture and how that manifests in the communities they create.

I think this is hard for liberals to understand because they’re so steeped in cultural relativism. They assume that cultural differences cannot be substantive—cannot shape the communities people create in substantive ways. So they cannot understand why anyone would object to mass settlement of culturally distinct groups except out of prejudice against immutable characteristics. Oddly, they seem to have this blind spot only for non-white people. Most would agree that West Virginia is the way it is because of West Virginians. But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka.

> But Bangladesh isn’t the way it is because of Bangladeshis, and it’s “racist” to suggest that importing 50,000 Bangladeshis to an enclave in the US would recreate dynamics that prevail in Dhaka

And that's fine to say. However, it isn't acceptable to invent a story that these Bangladeshis are eating pets with the goal to get everyone else to hate them though, especially when the place in question actually majority likes them, and was even asking for extra resources to help them.

Being a Haitian immigrant is an immutable characteristic. That aside, these were legal immigrants welcomed by the city and assimilating into the community, used as a scapegoat with a baseless conspiracy to stir anger on a campaign trail. I’m not sure what about this incident is defensible but it has nothing to do with culture. Are you being intentionally provocative or do you really believe this?

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