Hey, to be fair, it’s Bone’s personal, Libertarian-influenced morality, which is an entirely difficult kind of morality altogether.
Chorus of Dopers, droning
It’s an entirely difficult kind of morality.
/CoD, d
It’s certainly an odd sort of moral code that defers all judgment, and all responsibility, to the government. It’s odder still when it’s blatantly situationally dependent. It’s less odd when “wanting the government out of the lives of individuals” leads to cold-blooded deportations of people who’ve lived here since childhood.
But it’s not odd at all, but rather other adjectives, if it’s simply a restatement of “Stuff I like is a basic right; people who don’t look like me are bad”.
Related, from the Times: “No Need to Deport Me. This Dreamer’s Dream Is Dead.”
But since the cruelty is the point, I kind of doubt too many Trump supporters are upset that we’re losing this person with relevant advanced degrees, or care about her suffering.
Harry Reid’s former intern? “international affairs and French”? Yeah, I hope she enjoys Canada. I’m not terribly upset by her departure.
But someone of *your *credentials and accomplishments and contributions gets to stay here due to an accident of birth. Life sure is funny, huh?
Leaving aside that it was Obama who started the whole “innocent children in cages” thing.
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Where should they be put? Would it be better if they were deported immediately?
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How do you prevent creating the perverse incentive of making it better for someone to cross the border illegaly if they bring a child with them? How do you deal with many kids not coming with relatives and just being trafficked across the border?
That was one of the less-appropriate indulgences in false bothsidesism we’ve seen here, for reasons we’ve discussed and that you can review for yourself if interested.
*With *their families. They’re innocent, remember? Even their parents’ “crimes” consist only of coming here out of desperation.
Ah the party of Family Values … Gotta love it.
“Trafficked” or being sent by desperate parents to a place where they have a hope of survival? What do you mean by “trafficked”? Who benefits?
Why do you add the People Who Don’t Look Like Me bit at the end, there? If you’re against his position, fine; but what’s the point of swerving to toss in that last part?
Because that’s whose roundups and caging and child abuse and mass deportations, as if they aren’t really human, he supports, “unemotionally”. How else can you read that?
We don’t see that done to European students who overstay their visas, for instance, do we? What causes the difference?
Ask him. He’s right here in this thread, isn’t he? Ask him if he believes people who are here illegally should be treated differently according to skin color; if he says “no,” will you attribute the opposite position to him?
That earlier post was *by way of *asking him. No response yet.
Yes, let’s leave it aside. In fact, why would you even bring it up? Even if it were entirely 100% true in both text and subtext, why would it be remotely relevant? Assuming Obama did exactly what Trump is doing now for exactly the same reasons, what does that imply? Really think it through. Would it make what’s going on even one iota less horrible? Would it make the moral response to what’s going on different?
Seriously, I want you to ask yourself. Why did you bring this up? Why should it matter to anyone, save perhaps those trying to assess Obama’s political legacy (a question nobody has asked in this thread)?
Because I have a theory.
Y’know, I’m not an expert on immigration. I don’t have good answers to these questions. But I have to ask - why are you asking this? Is it about actually finding solutions?
It took me all of about five seconds to find this article detailing alternatives. They’re out there. There are absolutely options other than “separate families and hold children in concentration camps”. Effective ones, for purposes of “effective” you might care about.
But… they don’t matter, because the people running this program aren’t looking for effective, non-cruel solutions. We know that this is a new policy designed to be cruel as a deterrant. It’s not an easy problem, but the Trump administration is not looking for solutions. People who have been paying attention to this issue are aware that the problem is not and never has been “We don’t have a way to solve this other than child separation”. The cruelty is the point.
Maybe you don’t know any of this. Maybe you’re wading into this discussion without any of that context, or indeed, any real background knowledge on the subject at all. But you’ll have to excuse me if I read this as yet another attempt to find a reason not to care. “It’s not that bad, and even so, they don’t really have a choice, they need to do this.” It sounds less like “how can we do better?” and more like “how could we possibly do better?”. And I really gotta wonder - do you honestly think that this is the best we can do? Really?
Maybe I’m just projecting. But none of this is new information, and at this point even giving the administration the benefit of the doubt to the degree you have is deeply suspect.
Noting the lack of “moral response” during the Obama administration for similar treatment of immigrants highlights that this hysteria has more to do with finding something else to complain about President Trump over after the Russia thing turned out to be a dry well rather than genuine outrage over the conditions at our detention centers. It’s noting the selective outrage when a Republican does the same thing a democrat did. Someone else recently used the phrase “LARPing politics”. I think that fits here too.
Seems more like a week-ass attempt to change the subject to me.
Except he didn’t. Been over that.
Sure he did. The toothpaste complaint arose during the Obama administration. There are Obama-era photos of “kids in cages”. But anyways, the post I was responding was granting that, at least as a hypothetical: “Assuming Obama did exactly what Trump is doing now for exactly the same reasons…”
Sometimes (like now, for instance), thinking of the children is appropriate, when discussing law should be superseded by the discussion of ethics and morality.
It ain’t about toothpaste. :rolleyes:
There’s plenty of reasons why “Obama did it too” is, as far as arguments go, pretty fucking telling about whoever’s making it.
There’s the fact that it’s blatantly untrue, and that we all know that.
There’s the assumption that nobody cared about the problems in Obama’s immigration policy, when we also know that’s blatantly untrue.
There’s the assumption that the reason nobody said anything is that they knew and didn’t care - I can’t speak for anyone else, but back in 2014, I hadn’t heard about this.
And then there’s the core assumption - “we can point out some tentative, weak hypocrisy, therefore you secretly care as little about their suffering as I openly do.” Because if they can “prove” that we don’t really care, they have their excuse not to care. It’s 100% pure projection and fundamentally bullshit, but, for a change, I can’t actually prove that I’m not fundamentally operating in bad faith, that the jews being arrested at ICE detention centers aren’t going to jail just to stick it to Trump, that the people writing about this and volunteering for this and giving money for this aren’t all just a big anti-Trump conspiracy.
…Except, it’s also a really bad excuse. Even assuming I’m the kind of sociopathic fuckstick whose only interest in human suffering is “how can it benefit me politically”… Why does that give you a pass? The suffering is the same. There are still people crammed wall-to-wall in cells in concentration camps, families being separated, people dying. None of that has changed. It’s just that you’ve found some reason to believe that those who claim to care might, if they’re as deeply cynical as your fantasies imply, not care that much.
So. Fucking. What.
Congratulations, ignoring all the reasons why it’s bullshit, the very best-case scenario this argument gets you to is “You’re a terrible person, therefore you have no business criticizing me for being a terrible person”. “You don’t care about their suffering (despite all your claims to caring about their suffering), therefore it’s fine that I don’t care about their suffering.”
Is that where you want to be? Really?
This isn’t really my observation. @JuliusGoat said it all first. The whole thread is great and very much worth reading if you want to understand the modern republican party, but the conclusion he reaches is this:
That’s an ethos worth following.
Yeah, kids who had voluntarily separated themselves from their families by virtue of crossing the border unaccompanied is totally the same thing as kids crossing the border with their families then being forcibly separated.
[/sarcasm]